Friends of Hastings Cemetery
Tilden Tolman cont.
Tilden's prison records indicate that he was a married man, and while looking at references for him I found a record for Harriet “wife of Tildin Tolhurst”, buried at Stone in Oxney. Census records in 1841 show Harriet as a servant at Prawls Farm near Stone, with a two year old son, George. Harriet died in 1843 aged 35.
Tilden married his second wife, Ann, nee Sacre, in the September quarter 1847, in the Tenterden district, (this may well be the Anne of Ore, refused beer-
Barrett describes The Prince of Wales as a “disorderly house” and says that local people are scared to complain about the goings on at the establishment, for fear that “their windows would be broken and they themselves so insulted that they would be unable to live in the place.”
In the 1851 Census Tilden was described as an innkeeper residing at The Prince Of Wales, Brown Road, St Clements, with his wife Ann, son William and nine “visitors”. He may have acquired a second public house, since in 1854 he was fined for serving beer after hours at the Original Good Woman public house at the Fishmarket. His inn sign aroused protests in the press, portraying a woman with her head cut off and placed under her arm
By 1861 Tilden, by now a “dealer”, and his family, which now included daughter Sarah, were living at 46 High Street, a dealer in secondhand clothes. In 1860 he had put in a successful tender for the purchase of marine stores from the local council, to whit glass, rags, bones and iron, to be taken away quarterly from “the Ash Yard”. Presumably these were then sold on.
Tilden's occupation by the time of the 1881 Census is “annuitant” and his wife Ann is a “wardrobe dealer”. He died on the 22nd August that year aged 71, and left a will, the value of his personal estate being £220 5s 8d. Ann died in 1884.