William had a small farm and a teenage son, but no wife, and the household was looked after by Richard’s niece, Mary, who hailed from Meopham. Twenty years later, long after Richard had passed to his rest, William had married his cousin, but lost his farm. His son set up in business as a general dealer, which must have been a great boon to the thirty-odd inhabitants of New Street,
   Meanwhile, the forge at Hodsoll Street had been carried on by Richard’s eldest son, Thomas. In 1841, he was at Forge House with his wife Harriet and their four children, Elizabeth, Frederick, who at fifteen was already in the trade, Daniel and John. Ten years later, all three Sons had graduated as smiths and were at home helping their father, as, indeed, was Frederick after another twenty years. That was in 1871, when Thomas was aged eighty-one but still going strong, a ‘Master Blacksmith imploying 2 men’. Elizabeth, like Frederick, had stayed unmarried and she was in business as a dressmaker and draper. Daniel was at the ‘Blacksmith Shop’, where he lived with his wife Martha, a Suffolk girl, and their four children, Alpha, a name chosen with reasonably justified optimism, Herbert, Cyprian and

Ada; the children were all still at school. Daniel called himself a ‘Shoeing & Jobbing Smith’. Perhaps Frederick and he were the '2 men’.
   Even the southerly outskirts of West Yoke may have been too far distant for the forge there at Butlers Point to offer much serious competition to the Hodsoll Street forge, but any such competition as Richard and Thomas Bishop may have encountered would have come mostly from the Wadlows. The first of that family to arrive in Ash was a Thomas Wadlow. He took over at Butlers Point about 1787 from Richard Venner, who had himself replaced the previous blacksmith, John Cannam, some five years before. Unlike the Bishops, the smiths at this forge were then only tenants. In the seventeen-eighties, the forge, with its house and a little over an acre of land, belonged to a Mrs Skinner; in the following decade, the owner was Mr William Warren.
   Thomas Wadlow must have been a stranger to the district, for Michael Fletcher and John Rogers, who were the assessors for the Land Tax in 1787, called him ‘Waddle’. He and his wife, Jane Pink, had been wed at Bishopsgate in the City