▶Date of birth:  1849 (baptised 10 September 1849)        Place of birth:  Cheltenham

▶Father:  George Davis     Mother:  Eliza Stratton

▶Spouse(s):  (1) Eleanor Tullidge; (2) Mabel Beaufoy Davis      Date(s) of marriage:  (1) 13 June 1876; (2) 9 September 1906      Place(s) of marriage:  (1) Marylebone, London, Middlesex; (2) Gloucester

▶Occupation: Clergyman (Anglican), Tutor, Schoolmaster, Administrator

▶Lifestory: Charles Davis was born in Cheltenham in 1849, but after he was ordained he did not assume parochial duties in the town; instead, he took in pupils at the family’s old hime in Pittville. He was the elder son of grocer and tea-dealer George Davis, and his wife Eliza (née Stratton), who lived in Winchcombe Street, Cheltenham; both of his parents came from Gloucestershire. He was born in Cheltenham in 1849 and was baptised at St Paul’s Church in Cheltenham on 10 September that year. As he grew older he moved with his family within the same part of the town, in 1861 residing at 10 Mount Pleasant.

After leaving school, in 1870, he attended the Gloucester Theological College, and in the following year was a Theological Student at London University. When his father retired the family moved to 28 Clarence Square, Pittville, where he was registered at the time of the 1871 census. He took holy orders, and was ordained Deacon in 1872, latterly still a student of Gloucester Theological College, and Priest (both Gloucester) in 1873. Between 1872 and 1874 he was licensed as Curate of Bourton-on-the-Water. Then, for five years from 1874 until 1879, he served as Curate of St Mary de Lode, Gloucester. In 1876 he married Eleanor, daughter of James Tullidge, of Marylebone, and over the next twenty years the couple had three sons and three daughters.

In 1881 the family moved to Connaught Parade, in Kingsholm, Gloucester, and early the next year Davis was elected Chaplain to the Gloucester Union Workhouse. He was licensed as Curate of St Mary de Lode in 1884. In 1899 he moved from Connaught Parade in Gloucester to 1 Sydenham Villa, Kingsholm, but his wife died that year three weeks after giving birth.

His clerical duties were supplemented for a time by pedagogical ones, mainly conducted in Cheltenham, from his old family house of 28 Clarence Square, where he is recorded as principal resident from about 1879 until 1908. In 1879 he was elected FRGS, and in the same year set up as a private tutor in English, Mathematics, and Classics at his Clarence Square home; it was from this address that he maintained other educational duties, including serving from at least 1884 as the Local Secretary for the Society of Arts examinations and in 1885 working as the Secretary, and as a Master, at the Cheltenham High School for Girls, though this cannot have lasted for too long.

Davis was “a scholar of some distinction, and practically made a hobby of advanced mathematics”. In 1900 he was appointed Curate-in-Charge of the temporary Mission Church (also known as Holy Trinity, connected to Barnwood Church), Longlevens, Gloucester, where he remained until his death. He remarried in Gloucester, in 1906, to thirty-five-year-old Mabel Beaufoy Davis, though there were no further children. By 1911 they lived at Holy Trinity Parsonage, Elmbridge Road, Wotton, Gloucester, where Davis died in 1919, at the age of sixty-nine, after a bout of influenza; his estate at death was valued at just over £1,000.

▶Moved to Pittville from:  (born)      Moved from Pittville to: Gloucester

▶Date of death:  24 February 1919      Place of death: Wotton, Gloucester

▶Date of burial:         Place of burial:

▶Notes:        ID: 5651

Contributor(s):  John Simpson/Alan Munden