The writer of these pages was born in the year 1810, in the City of London, and in the Parish of Clerkenwell, being within sound of Bow Bells. My father was churchwarden of St. James's, Clerkenwell, and was a master-manufacturer of coal measures and coal shovels, now amongst the obsolete implements of by-gone days. His father was, I believe, a Scotsman, and has been illnaturedly surmised to have run away from the field of Culloden, where he may have fought under the name and style of Evan McTavish, a name which, like those of numbers of his fellow clansmen, would naturally anglicise itself into John Thompson, in order to save its owner's neck from a threatened Hanoverian halter. But he was both canny and winsome, and by-and-by succeeded in capturing the affections and "tocher" of Sarah Reynolds, daughter of the wealthy landlord of the Bull Inn, of Meriden, in Warwickshire, the greatest and oldest of those famous English hostelries, which did duty as the resting-place of monarchs _en route_, and combined within their solid walls whole troops of blacksmiths, carpenters, hostlers, and many other crafts and callings. No doubt from this source I got my Warwickshire blood, and English ways of thinking, in testimony of which I may cite the following facts: while living in Quebec, in 1859-60, a mason employed to rebuild a brick chimney challenged me as a brother Warwickshire man, saying he knew dozens of gentlemen there who were as like me "as two peas." Again, in 1841, a lady who claimed to be the last direct descendant of William Shakespeare, of Stratford-upon-Avon, and the possessor of the watch and other relics of the poet, said she was quite startled at my likeness to an original portrait of her great ancestor, in the possession of her family.
My grandfather carried on the business of timber dealer (we in Canada should call it lumber merchant), between Scotland and England, buying up the standing timber in gentlemen's parks, squaring and teaming it southward, and so became a prosperous man. Finally, at his death, he left a large family of sons and daughters, all in thriving circumstances. His second son, William, married my mother, Anna Hawkins, daughter of the Rev. Isaac Hawkins, of Taunton, in Somersetshire, and his wife, Joan Wilmington, of Wilmington Park, near Taunton. My grandfather Hawkins was one of John Wesley's earliest converts, and was by him ordained to the ministry. Through my mother, we are understood to be descended from Sir John Hawkins, the world-renowned buccaneer, admiral, and founder of the English Royal Navy, who was honoured by being associated with her most sacred Majesty Queen Elizabeth, in a secret partnership in the profits of piratical raids undertaken in the name and for the behoof of Protestant Christianity. So at least says the historian, Froude.