A Samaritan sea captain saved my ancestor, a Russian Imperial Army draft dodger with Cossack bounty hunters hot on his trail. My great-grandfather Jacob fled with his 12-year-old wife-to-be, Rachel and her daughter Leah, a baby in arms not yet a year old.

by Terry Walker

AS01030724

11 minute read

They arrived safely in England sometime in 1871. But it took a life-saving Samaritan act by a British sea captain and a conspiracy on the high seas involving Queen Victoria to get the family to safety.

They had fled Russia so Jacob, a tinker who sold cheese to local taverns, could avoid the forced conscription of young male Jews into the imperial army of Czar Alexander II. Russian laws decreed Jews should serve for 25 years or become Russian Orthodox Christians. Jacob wanted neither and became a draft dodger. But for the Samaritan sea captain’s rescue act, Jacob would have drowned. The Cossacks missed out on the 50 rouble bounty offered by the Czar. There were plenty of names on their list.

Jacob, along with 1,000s of other persecuted Jews, was aware of an escape route to freedom starting with the long trek to the German port of Bremen. Steamships left the port for Canada, the United States and England. Local agents for the shipping lines arranged paperwork and tickets for refugees. They came from Russia and Baltic countries like Lithuania and Belarus, which were under the yoke of the Czar.

Jewish Quarter, a short walk away

It seems likely that Jacob, Rachel and baby Leah booked tickets on MS Adler with its important route to London’s St Katharine Dock, from which the main Jewish Quarter is just a short walk away.

However, family folklore has my great-grandfather swimming desperately in the sea in the Bay of Riga to escape Russian Cossack bounty hunters who were closing in on him. He was spotted by the crew of a British passing tramp steamer and he was rescued and worked his passage to England. For his safety, when he returned to Russia to collect Rachel and baby Leah, it was decided he should take the name of the ship’s captain.

The captain even completed a retrospective birth certificate to indicate Jacob had been born aboard the ship. At that time, sea captains were issued with blank certificates to register the births and deaths of passengers. An impressive-looking official stamp carrying the inscription of Her Imperial Majesty Queen Victoria authenticated the certificate. It was as good as a passport – or better as passports did not exist in their current form until 1915.

Rescued by a passing steamship

The captain recorded his first “onboard birth” in the ship’s log and completed the birth certificate. He inserted the name Jacob Barnett and his place of residence, as Wrexham, North Wales. And so, says one family legend, my great grandfather was “born” – at sea at the age of 22.

Another, even more dramatic version was published as a full-page feature article in the Sunday Express in 1980. It has Jacob plunging into the freezing Baltic Sea, hotly pursued by Cossacks recruiting for the Russian Imperial Army. Jacob swam far from the shore and was rescued by the crew of a passing steamship. The ship’s captain produced a British birth certificate for Jacob, who then used it as his “passport” to return to Russia and bring Rachel and baby Leah to England.

Because of the mid-passage “name change,” it has proved difficult to establish the precise details of the escape from Russia.

With his family safely in London, Jacob decided they should “live in the place where I was born”—North Wales. Jacob’s completion of the family’s first national census proves the last stage of the journey. In 1881, he was the head of the household in the small town of Buckley near Wrexham. Then, he listed himself, Rachel, and little Leah as all born in Russia.

Wrexham in North Wales was to be the focus for immigrant Jews for nearly three decades after the arrival of Jacob, Rachel and Leah. There was already a well-worn route into the newly industrialised valleys of Wales. It was used by immigrant Jews seeking a better life than that in Russia and Eastern Europe. Britain’s coal and industrial boom offered fit and able refugees unlimited work opportunities.

Like other Jews arriving in Wales at that time, my great-grandfather had commercial and people skills related to the employment restrictions placed on Jews in Russia. Many Russian immigrants became hawkers, as did my great-grandfather. They travelled up and down the valleys to sell everyday goods to homemakers. They also attended country markets.

Life was safer and healthier

Rachel, a teenage mother who cared for baby Leah in whatever rented accommodation they could find, must have struggled to learn English and local ways. She seems to have retained her Yiddish and some Russian traits. The family had survived the traumatic dash for freedom from Russia and found Welsh life safer and healthier.

Within ten years of landing in Britain, the Barnett family had a four-room house on the straggling main street running through Buckley, near Mold in Flintshire. In 1883, my great-grandfather married Rachel, now age 24, at the main Jewish synagogue in East London. Subsequently, Jacob and Rachel produced eight more children.

My grandfather, Solomon (Saul) Barnett, was born in Britain in 1895, almost 24 years after his Jewish father fled Russia.

At some point, my great-grandfather dropped the name Jacob, preferring the English John or sometimes a Welsh version—David John. Rachel successfully raised little Leah and her eight siblings. Welsh English was their first language, and within the family, Yiddish was used.

“Thee leaves England at Chester and enters Wales. Eight miles on and thee comes to Buckley.”

Instructions written by a Buckley man to a prospective visitor from “furrin parts”

The Barnett family enjoyed a quiet, sheltered life in Buckley, a town that depended on coal mining and brick-making for its progress and growing prosperity. Rosanna was born in 1895, and Jacob, two years later, registered as a home birth. Within two years, there was Sarah and the following year, Rebecca arrived. Then, at intervals of two years, Abraham, Solomon, (my granddad) Doris and Lazarus arrived. They were recorded for the first time in the 1911 census.

The census recorded that John (Jacob) Barnett and Rachel had produced nine children, six born over just 13 years. The neighbours would have dubbed this birth rate “steps and stairs” because this frequency was quite common then. They all lived into adulthood and beat the lousy survival odds of poor families in Victorian Britain. The family mastered English very well. John Barnett wrote his census entry in his 1901 census form in a firm and legible hand. Another census form showed Rachel had also become a licensed hawker. She was probably trading from their front room on the main road in Buckley.

Acquired obvious survival skills

My grandfather, Solomon “Saul” Barnett, who was listed in local trade directories as a licensed hawker—complete with horse and cart—was ambitious and hardworking. As a youth, he was often involved in neighbourhood escapades. As an adult, neighbours described him as “nabbert” (nothing but trouble).

He was born in Wales, served briefly in the Welsh Fusiliers in WW1, married in an English Bethel Chapel and was buried in a Jewish cemetery.

Subsequently, Solomon (also known as Sol or Saul) Barnett became my first direct English-born ancestor on the maternal side of the family. He had acquired evident survival skills from his Russian parents and hard-working neighbours in Buckley and Leeswood.

My granddad Saul was brought up in a Yiddish and English-speaking household. From an early age, he helped his father as he peddled silver jewellery and household items along the grimy streets of Buckley and nearby Leeswood.

Working as a coal miner

By 1911, my grandfather was working in a nearby coal mine, according to Dr Cai Parry-Jones, Curator of Oral History at the British Library. In his landmark book, Jews of Wales: A History, published in 2017, he wrote: “Jews in other parts of Wales also worked in essentially working-class occupations. Solomon Barnett of Buckley, the son of a Russian-Jewish hawker, was working as a miner in Flintshire in 1911, while Russian-born Abraham Glazier was an ironworker in Shotton, Flintshire, during the same period.”

Buckley and neighbouring towns were booming at the end of the 19^th century because of what was brought up from out of the ground:

• Best quality clay for Buckley bricks, pottery and tiles that sold around the world and
• Cannel coal had a pithead price five times that of standard coal and twice the value per ton excavated of gold mined in Australia and California.

Better than an Eldorado gold rush

It was better than an Eldorado gold rush. Cannel coal was mined, gas flared off from steaming stacks and coal tar was produced. The coal also produced town gas. The oil content was refined into petrol at a much lower cost than that supplied by American oil fields. Cannel came from newly worked mines in the nearby Clwydian Range, the Hope and Buckley Mountains and the Mold Valley.

The Prime Minister of the day, William Gladstone, visited and declared: “We have a splendid steam coal, with an immense demand for it— a demand greater than we can at present supply.

“This extraordinary treasure of the Cannel coal is, as you know, far better for the manufacture of gas than any other coal. Reviews of the Mineral Specimens at the Exhibition in London indicate that the Cannel coal from Leeswood, near Mold, is considered to be the very finest ever brought before the public.”

As the Cannel coal boom continued, landowners and mine owners became very rich and mines and mining rights were traded for huge sums. Some of the proceeds trickled down into the wider working community. Not that all people experiencing poverty would notice or benefit from it.

Some families did manage to improve their living standards and raise their aspirations on the back of the smelly coal oil industry.

Work was dangerous, death rate high

The Barnett family had money coming in from John, my great-grandfather, tramping the streets with his peddler’s cart. Their daughter Leah, probably a servant in a big house up the road. But times remained tough.

My granddad, Solomon, at 17, was, as detailed in the book Jews of Wales, working at one of the privately owned local coal mines. The pay was low, work was dangerous, and the death rate was high due to lax standards in what today we call “health and safety”.

There was enough money for my great-grandma, Rachel, to provide regular meals and a good table. That kept the family strong and healthy. She and John had produced nine children, all of whom survived. This survival rate was against the odds, given the high mortality rate in 19th-century Britain.

“Ensure your baby’s feed milk comes from the same cow”

Official motherhood advice

It was estimated that 1 in 5 children died before their fifth birthday. Infant mortality has always been high. This was mainly due to the lack of sanitation and general hygiene, especially among low-income people. However, wealthier families were not immune to early death. Consumption was the cause of death of many young people, as were cholera outbreaks. Childbirth claimed many women across the whole social scale.

In retrospect, official motherhood guidance didn’t help much: “Ensure your baby’s feed milk comes from the same cow.” This directive could not apply to mother and child in many urban tenements.

Despite the poor survival odds, the Barnetts of Buckley thrived and stayed Jewish. This was when there were few Jews in North Wales for mutual support. Some older children became locally employed and moved out of the family home.

However, a major family scandal that shocked local communities resulted in a wholesale family move from Wales to England. Life for the Barnetts was about to change dramatically.

Another version of Terry Walker’s ancestors’ Flight to Freedom

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