Occupiers of No. 8 Gloucester Road

John Evomy & Alice Phelps

By the 1881 census, the house was occupied by the Phelps family.

The Phelps’s had recently moved to Thornbury from Downend/Staple Hill in Bristol.  The register of baptisms at St Mary’s Church shows that John Evomy Phelps, medical assistant, and Alice Mary his wife baptised their son, John, on 6th October 1882.

John and Alice had several more children.  One daughter, Lilian Alice Phelps, went on to marry James Boucher Pridham and they were the parents of Albert Pridham who lived for many years in the house now known as Georgian House at the junction of St John Street and The Plain.

By 1891 John Evomy Phelps had moved to the High Street and was living next door to the Castle Hotel.  The 1897 Kellys Directory shows him living in the High Street and working as a surgeon’s assistant and deputy registrar of births and deaths.  In the 1901 census, he is living at 62 High Street.  In the 1930’s he is said to have lived in the second house from the end of High Street – to left of where flats are now.  It’s one of the three-storey houses.

John Phelps was the official non–clinical assistant to Dr. E.M. Grace who spent many hours playing cricket.  It is said that Dr Grace’s priority was cricket and he often left John Phelps to make house calls and to deliver babies.  When a new practitioner arrived in town, he complained about this unprofessional practice.  The story goes that John Evomy Phelps started medical school at London University but due to lack of funding never qualified as a medic but was known locally as Dr. Phelps.  Dr. E.M.Grace left £50 in his will to John.

We understand that John married for a second time about 1930 when he would have been about 75 – this time to a Maud Mary Dixon.  They moved back to Gloucester Road around this time and went to live in number 34, the house previously occupied by Frank Kelson Howell, the monumental mason.

John died in 1940 aged 87 and he is buried in Thornbury Cemetery.  The gravestone inscription on his grave acknowledges the 'over fifty years practised as a true friend surgeon physician'.

Click here for the obituary of John Evomy Phelps

This page was last updated: 28/08/2007