Loughborough Family Connections: Nash – Burder – Fison

17 July 2020

A one-time resident of Ashby Road, the Reverend Frederick Gifford Nash was born in Fowlmere, Cambridgeshire on 30th June 1819.

He attended Pembroke College, Cambridge University, was ordained in 1844 and became the Vicar of Diseworth from 1845 to 1851. He married Miss Sarah Eliza Hackett.

On his retirement he moved to ‘Clavering’, Ashby Road, Loughborough where he died on 21st August 1904.

In his will he left effects to the considerable sum of £3786 13s 6d. Reverend Nash’s executors were his son, Reverend Frederick Cordon Nash, clerk, and his son-in-law, Walter Chapman Burder, horticultural engineer.

Frederick and his wife Sarah had daughters who through their marriages connected the Nash family to two influential families in Loughborough. Lucy Maud Nash married Oliver Fison and Elizabeth Jane Gifford Nash married Walter Chapman Burder.

The Loughborough Roll of Honour contains the war record of Captain (Brigade Major) James Frederick Lorimer Fison MC, who was born on 23rd June 1890. He was the eldest son of James Oliver Fison, manufacturer of chemical fertiliser, and his wife Lucy Maud Fison (née Nash).

On 2nd July 1889 James’s parents were married at the Church of St. Mary and St. Clement, Clavering, Essex, where the service was conducted by the bride’s father, the Reverend Frederick Gifford Nash, then Vicar of Clavering. James Fison had two brothers, Frank and John, and three sisters, Madeleine, Florence and Sylvia. The Fison family lived at Stutton Hall, Suffolk, a fine Tudor house overlooking the Stour estuary.

James was a frequent visitor to Loughborough, where a number of close relatives on his mother’s side of the family were living. His aunt, Elizabeth Jane Gifford Nash, had married Walter Chapman Burder, a horticultural engineer and owner of Messenger and Company. They lived at Field House, situated near the Epinal Way/Ashby Road roundabout.

His maiden aunts, Edith and Frances Nash, and his uncle Thomas Nash also lived in Loughborough, as did his maternal grandparents the Reverend Frederick Gifford Nash (retired) and his wife Sarah Eliza. Whether James was ever employed at Fisons in Loughborough is unknown to us but as he was the heir apparent to the Fisons’ empire, some involvement seems likely.

Another of Reverend Frederick Gifford Nash’s daughters, Edith (mentioned above) was a WWI Red Cross Auxiliary at Loughborough Hospital. Edith was among those celebrated in the Loughborough Library Local Studies Volunteers’ exhibition about the 42 members of the Loughborough Voluntary Aid Detachment (VADs), a county branch of the Red Cross.

Article and Research by Loughborough Library Local Studies Volunteers.

Advert for Messengers in ‘The Gardeners’ Chronicle: a weekly illustrated journal of horticulture and allied subjects’ (1895)
(Illustration in the public domain.)

Read a blog post by Lynne Dyer about the houses on Ashby Road, including Clavering and Field House.