The Bates family, one of the maternal branches of the Bonners, originated in Northumberland County, the northeastern-most county of England, on the Scottish border. Sir Ralph Bates (1734-1783) and Lady Anne Ellison were wealthy, landed gentry—they owned a large estate known as Milbourne Hall just north of Newcastle-upon-Tyne that had resided in the Bates family for generations. Ralph was a baronet and served as High Sheriff of Northumberland in 1762.
A Daughter—Disowned
Their youngest daughter, Nancy Bates, was born in 1777. Nancy’s father died just 6 years later in 1783.
When Nancy was about 20, she fell in love with a Scottish commoner, Robert Turnbull, a tailor from the small town of Lilliesleaf, just over the Scottish border. In those times, most members of the English gentry married others of the same class to preserve the family wealth and pedigree. Nancy’s mother disapproved of her betrothal to the tailor Robert and disowned her.
When they married, Nancy gave her name to the civil authorities as “Nancy Milburn,” using the name of her family estate rather than her last name “Bates,” possibly to assert her heritage.
A Prideful Scot
Robert and Nancy had six children. Their fourth, Robert Turnbull Jr., was born in 1808.
The Turnbull family immigrated to Canada from Scotland in the 1820s as a result of the English “removals” that drove Scots off their hereditary farmland. The Bonner family left Scotland for the same reason in the late 1820s.
At some point during his childhood, Robert Jr. returned to Milbourne Hall in Northumberland in an attempt to establish contact with his grandmother, Anne Ellison Bates, the Lady Milbourne. The trip from Lilliesleaf to Milbourne Hall is about 40 miles, so one imagines that Robert Sr. might have taken the boy on the journey.
Robert Jr. presented himself at the front door of Milbourne Hall, where a butler greeted him with a sovereign from Lady Milbourne. Robert’s grandmother then instructed the butler to have the boy come around to the servant’s entrance to get a meal before going along his way. Robert refused the sovereign and the meal. He sounds to have been a true Scot, willful and prideful!
Robert Jr. became a tailor like his father. He immigrated to Canada in 1832, eventually settling by 1834 in Elma, Galt, Ontario, where he had a tailor shop on West Main Street. Robert married Ellen Little in 1836. They were well known to their grandson, R.J. Bonner, who recorded the story of the visit to Melbourne Hall and the declined offer of a sovereign and a meal.
© 2013 W. Mullins
