We know very little about John and Jane except that they married in Ripon Cathedral, lived in north Yorkshire for a while, but later moved south, first to Headingley, Leeds, and later to Bradford, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. In Headingley John worked as a gardener and coachman.
John's granddaughter Lilian (1889-1983) wrote about her grandparents John and Jane Dumville:
'My father (Joseph) lived in Bradford with two brothers and two sisters. His father (John) was a coachman and with his wife they were a very strict couple. The children had to clean and polish their boots on Saturday evening ready for Sunday Morning chapel. We did not often eat there but on one occasion they forced me to put a big piece of beef fat into my mouth. I felt sick, left the table, went out down the open passage to the shared 'loo'. They were back-to-back houses. We stayed at my maternal grandparents but on Saturday mornings my sister and I had to visit the stern folk, where we always got a Marie biscuit and a halfpenny with which we had to buy some stick liquorice. One Saturday, we bought, instead, an icing sugar watch - a halfpenny each, but we had to take them back and get the liquorice.'
Robert is mentioned in the newspaper The Bradford Telegraph and Argus, 10 June 1941:
Veterans sing at concert
Eighty-year-old members of the Chellow Dene Veterans' Association contributed to a concert at a meeting in Ladyhill Park, Allerton, Bradford. Yesterday. A presentation of a bouquet of flowers and a photograph of himself was made to Mr Walter Wood, who was retiring from the presidency of the association, after having been president for 13 years.
Among the members who contributed to the concert (all over 80) were Messrs R Dumville (the oldest member of the association), S Bancroft, G Titterington, and S Atkins.
Robert wrote his Will on 9 November 1927, when living at 15 Birch Street, Manningham, Bradford. He signed it adding 'Painter'. Probate was granted 5 April 1943. He left everything to his wife, Annie Maria, and
'after her decease in trust for (his) nephew Horace Stilgoe, (his) niece Emma Sheard, the wife of ... Fred Sheard and (his) niece Doris Braybrook.'
Executors were his wife, nephew-in-law Fred Sheard 'of Cemetery Road, Bradford, Dyers Labourer' and his niece Doris Braybrook 'of 63 Horton Green, Bradford, Spinster and Sports Outfitters Assistant'. Witnesses were both Clerks to the Solicitor.
Brenda Holroyd (nee Dumville) recounts that Horace Stilgoe 'lived tally' (ie local parlance for 'lived with') a Dumville lady, in a life of otherwise great respectability. We haven't yet worked out the exact relationship of Horace, Emma and Doris. They might be children of Robert's sisters, but we know for sure only of sister Annie, who married Richard Carr (and had two daughters, one son), and sister Lucy, who married but left no children. Did, after all, another sister survive?
We found no Will for Tom between 1944 and 1969. Tom was first a wool combing overlooker (1891, 1901), and then a grocer in Bradford. He and his wife Annie later lived in Blackpool (South Shore). Eveline, first wife of their grandson Denis, remembers Annie as a nice lady. Annie and Eveline's mother were good friends; the latter ran a Bed and Breakfast on North Shore with her husband.
Tom and Annie's son Charlie also became a grocer, first in Bradford and later in Blackpool, near or on Palatine Road. Before she married Charlie his wife Alice (nee Busfield) ran a pie and pastry shop in Bingley with her sister. After they moved to Blackpool Alice worked as manageress in the chocolate department of Colinson's on the promenade.
Charlie's son Denis was born in Bradford, and settled in London at the end of the war. His first marriage, in 1942 to Eveline Mary Hornby, ended in divorce in 1949. On his marriage certificate he gave his profession as canteen secretary; on his daughter's birth certificate in 1945, as accountant. After his father died (in about 1956?) his mother Alice moved to London to live with Denis in Prince Albert Road.
In the 1950s Denis was one of the pioneers of the hi-fi system. By 1968 he was director of his own company dealing with tape learning equipment (pre-sleep study) and was living at 153 Fellows Road, Swiss Cottage, London NW3. He married a second time, in the late 1960s, Rosemary, a German national, and they had one daughter in 1969.
In 1955 Denis had visited the USA at the invitation of Samuel Hall-Dumville who lived in Washington DC. Hall-Dumville was about 40 at that time, in the electronic business and used to manufacture 'educators'. He was an inventor and held many patents. He had investigated his own side of the Family Tree but we knew nothing more about it and wondered if we were related? Mr Hall-Dumville died in 1968.
Recently, in May 2003, we received emails from Charla Dumville Pfeffinger, who is related to Mr Hall-Dumville - though not to the Dumvilles of Hunton, so far as we know at present, anyway. Mr Hall-Dumville was her grandfather's brother's son. They are related to the Dumvilles of Olney, Buckinghamshire: Charla is the sixth great-granddaughter of Edmund Dumbile/Dumville and his second wife, Ann Turner.