Tombi Peck says:


At the time of the 1851 census Walter and Honor were both 54 and at Walsingham, along with daughters Honor (30) and Clare (24). Walter was listed as a miller and farmer with 170 acres, employing five men and two boys.

Walter was a cousin of the Brownes of the Lowestoft porcelain factory (his mother was a Browne) and there were a number of millers in various parts of East Anglia called Chaston who were also cousins of the Brownes. Robert Burtsal, miller at Ellingham watermill, was also connected to the Browne family by marriage, as was William Shearing who became miller at Ellingham watermill when Robert Burtsal died on 7th November 1856.

Peter Murray (1997) says:


Walter Thurtell, third son of John and Anne Thurtell of Hobland Hall, was born on 15 June 1796. He lived at Ormsby House, Grange Road, Sutton, Surrey, and died on 11 January 1892, at Lynn, having taken ill suddenly while travelling from Newcastle to Yarmouth, and is buried at Highgate in London. He collected the information on the origin of the Thurtell name. Walter is believed to have studied engineering, and this may have been his career. Four volumes of mechanics magazines dated 1842 inscribed with his signature still exist. To these are attached bookplates with his name and crest, the crest however differing in all except the motto from the one otherwise associated with the Thurtell family.

Walter and Honor had eight children mentioned in family records and three others appearing in parish registers.

The death reference above is for Walter Thurtell dying at Kings Lynn in 1880 at age 84 and is more persuasive than the 1892 date.




Summary


Miller at Wighton, near Wells in Norfolk, where in October 1836 he seems to have suffered a bankruptcy. Remained at Wighton until the mid-1850s, when he sold up, went to Newcastle and became a flour factor. He is the ‘Uncle Walter’ of Sarah’s letters, making visits as a happy widower to his children in London; his son, Sydney Turner, also makes regular appearances in the letters. At the time of his death, Walter lived at 56 Clayton Park Square, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and his estate was valued at under £12,000. All Walter’s children seem to have called themselves Turner except the eldest, Walter, who lived in Sutton and interested himself in family history; and Horace, who went to South Africa and is the only one with any descendants. The other children were Honor, Clara, Bertha and Augusta. From Sarah’s letters the daughters would appear all, apart from Augusta who was in a wholesale house in London, to have been teachers or governesses. Honor died in Gravesend in 1905; we know little of Clara after 1851 except that she died unmarried in 1863 in Wem, Shropshire, where she may have been a governess; Bertha appears in the 1871 census as a daily governess in her Manfred cousins’ school in Kensington; Augusta Turner appears often enough, as a visitor to Sarah Murray (and see, for example, the photo with Anne Evans in her chaise). [JC]