Donna,
thanks to you, and a couple of strokes of luck I think I have sorted it out. My mother knew there were connections through marriage with the Maleys and James families that also linked in to Eddie Barnes, Gen Mgr of the MER from 1936 to 1950, and she was friends with Dorothy Barnes who died aged as a result of an accident with an x-ray machine in 1933.

I did not know whether Eddie was married to a Maley or a Barnes or what her name was, and I was in real trouble. Your MI look up gave me her names and an age, viz Prudence Sarah and a DOB of c1877/78.

So I decided to run searches on Maley or James girls born at that time with those names, but being off the island, I could not check the parish registers etc, so was limited to the IGI and the data on Brian Lawson's site, which Brian never finished before his untimely death.

Brian's site lists a group of children born to John Fry James and Sarah Ann Weller, but does not LIST Prudence Sarah, but it does list a George Washington, which is an odd choice of names. I could not find a marriage for John Fry James and Sarah Ann Weller on the Island, so tried the UK, and they were married at Alfred Place Chapel, St Saviour, Southwark, Surrey on 25 May 1872. I tried the IGI 1881 census for the UK, with no result and then the IOM with NO result, and then started discarding data, and found John TROY James and Sarah Ann James, and a George Washington James, but better still there were daughters Lucy Emma and Sarah. Now Lucy Emma has not so far appeared in the story, but Lucy Emma was George Joughin Maley’s first wife. By this time I had concluded that TROY was an IGI misread for FRY, and I am sure the guy was Fry.

However the big surprise was Sarah Ann Weller, as the census gave her place of birth, BROOKLYN ! That fitted with a snippet I recalled from my mother that there was some American connection with the Barnes family. There was, as Eddie’s wife, Prudence, was half American, through her momma. Prudence’s father J F James was a dentist who had worked in London and then in the IOM. Given Sarah Ann Weller’s Brooklyn antecedents, George Washington James becomes intelligible.

So the story seems to be Dorothy (1907-1933 thought I still have no DOB) was the daughter of Eddie Barnes and Prudence Sarah James. Her sister was Lucy Emma James, who married George Joughin Maley. GJM was the son of chemist George Maley of Douglas and his wife Christiana Esther Joughin who died in childbirth in June 1871. CEJ, in turn was a sister to Mary Ann Joughin, my mother’s grandmother. The two girls were the daughters of John Joughin and Catherine “Kitty the Chaney” Clucas of Peel, their brother being John Joughin MHK, of Fishing Net factory fame..

Tramway enthusiasts, if they hear the name Maley, think of Maley & Taunton, the most innovative tramway engineering company in the British Isles until the demise of trams in the 1950s. Many Liverpool and Glasgow cars rode on M&T equipment, and if you look under the body of an MER tram, most of them have a motor compressor set for the air brakes lettered M & T. After Christiana Esther Joughin died in 1871, George Maley remarried, his new wife, Eliza being a Scots lass, but I have no further data on her. In 1880 they had a son, Alfred Walter Maley, who was therefore a half brother to George Joughin Maley. A W Maley was the Maley of M&T, so the most influential and innovative tramway engineer in the first half of the 20th century was a Manxman, which is kind of nice to know. AWM would have seen the first section of the MER to Groudle open as he would be 13, so it may be that his interest in electric traction was kindled then, and he went on to play a lead role in EMB and then M&T, which in effect covered every modern tram truck produced from the 1920s to the collapse of tram production in the 1950s. If it had a modern truck, then Alfred Walter had designed it !

My mother had close contacts with the Maleys, James and Barnes families, and I am sure that AWM would have known Eddie Barnes, which helps explain how it was that AWM offered to provide the MER with power trucks at cost price in the 1930s as a run on to another order. Sadly the MER was so hard up that they could not even cope with cost price, so the opportunity was lost.

So far I have not found out much about Eddie Barnes parents, but we have made good progress, and I am VERY VERY glad of that as I am working on a new book on the Manx Electric. My Mother and Dorothy were inseparable as kids, Dorothy coming down to Ramsey one weekend to stay with Mum’s family whilst she went up to Douglas the next week to stay with the Barnes. Dorothy just could NOT get up in the morning, no matter how many times you called her, and she would scuttle downstairs, grab a hunk of bread, stuff her feet into her lace up books, and gallop down the road with her laces flying.

The MER crews knew all about Dorothy, and although it was the Boat Car for the 9.00am Liverpool boat, there was no way they would leave her behind, so she would scramble on to the car out of breath and within seconds they would be off, Dorothy eating her breakfast, and then attending to her laces, combing her hair and so on. What other passengers thought about the teenage girl jumping on the tram, lacing up her boots in between mouthfuls of bread, and then combing her hair, I do not know ! There was at least one occasion when a passenger did complain that they were late starting out, and the reply was “We can’t go, Dorothy’s not here”.

I planned to tell the story of Dorothy in the book, as it produced an enchanting portrait of the MER but I really wanted to get the relationships correct, and thanks to you I have.

Robert