of London, so maybe they were Cockneys. Not so their three Sons, Thomas, George and Edward, who were all born in Ash during the Seventeen-nineties. There were also two little girls, but unhappily one died of the measles.
   Thomas junior and George both in their time became blacksmiths, Thomas succeeding at Butlers Point. The Wadlows prospered sufficiently to take a leaf out of the Bishops’ book and acquire the freehold of the forge and the house and land that went with it. They also spread their wings, either buying or renting another forge at Kingsdown.
   In 1841 Thomas Wadlow was at Butlers Point with his wife, four of their five children and Thomas Parker, a journeyman smith. One daughter, Mahala, had gone into service at the Rectory. According to Bagshaw, George Wadlow was in charge six years later and a Thomas Wadlow, who might have been either Thomas himself or his son of the same name, was at Kingsdown. If there had been a switch, it was only a temporary one. In the Ash Register of Voters for 1848, Thomas’ abode was given as Butlers Point, of which he was listed as freeholder, and he was certainly there three years later. By then Thomas, now a widower and into his sixties,

was employing two hands, one of them being his younger son, Henry, who at sixteen years of age was already engaged in the trade. Mahala had returned home, presumably either because of her mother’s death or in consequence of the rector’s temporary return to his Fawkham parsonage after the death of Mary Salwey. Mahala and her younger sister, Harriet, had set up as dressmakers. The youngest daughter, Mary Ann, did the household chores and, maybe, looked after Thomas’ four year old grandson, another Thomas, who was apparently on lease from Kingsdown. A good deal of boarding out of young children with grandparents took place in Victorian times, usually, no doubt, while their mothers’ attentions were fully engaged by even younger children.
   Three generations of Wadlows worked at Butlers Point, but no more. They appear to have left both their Ash and Kingsdown forges while the Bishops still soldiered on at Hodsoll Street. Certainly they were gone from Ash by 1861, when James Allchin, a Kingsdown man by birth, had taken over. He did not long remain and, some few years later, the forge had become the