No. 8, Queen’s Terrace
The Carter Family
Who was John Carter?
John Carter was born in 1829 in the neighbouring holiday resort of Blackpool to Esau and Susannah Carter. Esau owned the Athenaeum Reading Rooms, from which he originally ran the Post Office, plus a toyshop and a grocery store. The Post Office was moved to the Adelphi Hotel when he opened it in the middle of the 1830s.
Another Esau Carter in Poulton, possibly a first cousin to the one in Blackpool, had a son of the same name who changed his name to Esau Carter Monk and moved to Fleetwood. Both John Carter and Esau Carter Monk would become prominent Fleetwood citizens, and their lives were intertwined.
John Carter moved to Fleetwood in 1845, aged 16, to do bookkeeping and auditing for the railway company. He was probably responsible for the accuracy of the weekly returns of railway goods and passengers.
He had recently been appointed booking and telegraph clerk when the royal visit took place in 1847, with promotion soon after to goods agent for the railway.
He met Margaret Lewtas Greenwood, whose parents were John Greenwood, a Poulton attorney, and his wife Mary, from the Lewtas family, but they were both dead. She moved to the Liverpool home of her uncle, Thomas Lewtas. He was a surgeon and GP whilst Margaret and her elder cousin Catherine Lewtas were described as servants. Margaret clearly experienced life both above and below stairs.
John Carter married Margaret Lewtas Greenwood at Bispham on 19th March 1851, the couple making their first home at 62 Warren Street. By 1858 they had moved to 15 Victoria Street, and Richard Seed was their landlord. By 1864 they had again moved, to 34 Victoria Street.
By 1870 they had five sons and three surviving daughters born between 1852 and 1869. Their youngest child, named John after his father, was born on 2nd May 1868. The had rented a few houses before they were finally settled, but were now renting No. 8 (then listed as No. 6). Their new house, which they moved into between May 1868 and January 1870, was large enough to house a growing family and its servants.
1870: A new home for the family
Following the death of Fleetwood’s founder, Sir Peter Hesketh Fleetwood, his executors were left to settle his complicated estate, including his land and property in Fleetwood. This property was sold in a two-day auction, starting at the Crown Hotel on Friday 28th January 1870, made up of 128 lots. Not all were single properties; some cottages in Flag Street and Lower Dock Street were sold in multiples of up to five.
The auction notice pointed out that existing tenants could buy their property together with the freehold, avoiding future ground rents. John Carter was one of the few tenants with sufficient funds to do this. He had just turned 40, and was able to find £420 for the property, the equivalent in January 2026 of £43,626. This was a real bargain, and as his was only the 6th lot, he was soon free to get back to work or go home for a cuppa. His name appears at the bottom of the following extract from the Chronicle.
The house became the family home for nearly four decades, and we can follow the census records to see what happened to the family.
The 1871 Census
The 1871 census labelled the Carter home as No. 9.
John was now 42 and his wife Margaret was 45. The two eldest sons were railway clerks and the next oldest, at 15, was a bank clerk. A son and three daughters were at school, but John junior was not yet three.
Supporting the household were a governess, a nurse, and a maid, making 10 family members and 3 staff, a total of 13 living in the house, some of the servants possibly in the basement.
The 1881 Census
The numbering of the house had reverted to No. 6, as it appeared when auctioned in 1870.
The first thing we see from the 1881 census is the absence of John’s wife Margaret. She was staying at 12 Holmefield in Sale, the home of the family of Elizabeth Buckley, a calico printer whose son William became a future son-in-law to John and Margaret Carter. Mrs. Carter described herself as wife of a railway superintendent.
Also absent was Charles Carter, the couple’s banking son, boarding in Christ Church Street in Preston.
A third absence was George Charles Carter. He married Nannie Wright, daughter of Fleetwood fisherman Jeffrey Wright, on 9th July 1879 at Christchurch in Thornton. He was a shipping agent aged 26, she was 20. By 1881 the Carters had a ten-month-old granddaughter named Marguerite May Carter. George and his family only moved as far as No. 3 Queen’s Terrace, to the right of the Steamer.
At the Carter home, John described himself as a railway agent, with the word “Carrier” added above as an afterthought. He was 52 and had been working for the railway for nearly 36 years. He was also on the Local Board for Fleetwood, as was his (apparent) kinsman, Esau Carter Monk.
Although the family no longer needed their previous nurse, they kept her on as a servant.
The 1891 Census
Hooray, 40 years after Wyre Holm was built between the property and the old Custom House, the Carter property finally bore No. 8 as its address, as it does to this day.
John was now 62, his wife 65, and he was still the railway agent for Fleetwood. The couple’s youngest was now aged 22, so there were a number of changes in the make up of this family home.
All the children were now grown-ups, and had begun to leave No. 8, some of them getting married and having their own children. However, Charles, now aged 35 and single, was back at home with the youngest children.
The 1901 Census
This appeared in the Blackpool Herald on 28th September 1897.
John Carter had been working for the railway company for 51 years. It was time to consider whether retirement would suit him. He finally retired in 1898, granting an interview to the Fleetwood Chronicle.
All the children had now flown the nest, leaving it occupied by John, aged 72, and his wife, aged 75. Mary Drinkwater, their only servant, was from Sale.
The following announcement had appeared in the South Wales Daily News on 8th June 1891, concerning May Carter.
Did the family have an Argentinian connection? One of the children, the eldest son Frederick, was unaccounted for in UK records after 1881, and might have emigrated as he cannot be traced in UK death records.
Another foreign connection surrounds their daughter Margaret Alice Carter. She married Francis Charles Buscarlet on 2nd September 1897 in Fleetwood, a civil engineer. Margaret was not in the 1901 census, yet her son Willett was born in Switzerland around 1899.
After 1901
John Carter’s wife Margaret passed away at the age of 76 on Saturday 2nd November 1901, as reported in the Blackpool Times.
John remained in his adoptive home town until around 1906, when he moved in with his son and daughter-in-law in Ulverston, where Walter was a bank manager. John Carter had lived in Fleetwood since 1845, and at No. 8 for the best part of 40 years.
He passed away at Bank House in Ulverston on 29th July 1911 aged 82. Here is the account of his funeral in the Fleetwood Chronicle.
