Gerard Rawes … Synopsis

    The Gerard Rawes biography is a true tale of man’s rags to riches life—not in the traditionally inferred ‘Cinderella’ sense, yet maybe not too far from it. Gerard discovered that life could transport a man from one situation into another as if sucked up by a tsunami to be tossed on to the beach of a new world. This young man in rural England in the mid-to-late eighteenth century, proves a living example of how the emerging industrial revolution could catapult a man out of a world of serfdom into social London. Archival records give irrefutable credence to it.

    A historian writing about real people finds recorded in a motley array of archives, dates and places pointing the directions of his characters’ lives. Yet when the events happened some two hundred years ago, we can but cogitate and hypothesise on what occupied those characters’ minds—about what happened in their private worlds—how and why they were drawn into the situations recorded as ‘events’ in their lives.

    The events in Gerard’s life are mostly those of Birth, Baptism, Marriage and Death records and various English Census results. Some facts unearthed tell us of his education in youth and of his career life and abodes.

    The early to mid eighteenth century in England was a time of change—too early for the industrial revolution, yet with the Napoleonic wars raging and politics discovering emergence from the Divine-Right of Kings, the first traces of a middle-class was discernable in history’s pages.

    Gerard found himself delivered by fate’s fortunes, from a mediocre rural beginning into affluence—introduced by chance opportunity, into the London social scene as tailor to the nation’s nobility.

    He married well, and grasped opportunity to become not only a successful craftsman and businessman, but family man.