Scillitoe – Yellow House
The Scillitoe family may not be as widely known outside Earls Colne as the other people whose story we’ve told but they have one important claim to fame – they’ve been living in the village continuously, longer than any other family.
The church registers of Baptisms, Marriages and Burials begin in the reign of Queen Elizabeth the first and on the very first pages, we find the name ‘Albon Scillitoe, son of William’ who was baptised in 1584.
By the time they first appear in the Earls Colne records, they had set up business as a butchers.
Their display of meat would have looked much like that outside Mr Wenden’s High Street Shop, shown here in 1890.
Unfortunately, Albon’s son John tried to increase the meat supply by stealing a calf from a farm at Sible Hedingham and served a prison term in the dungeons of Colchester Castle.
By the nineteenth century, the Scillitoes were still flourishing. The Census return for 1851 shows them as members of eleven households in Earls Colne, although, by then, several of them were working on the land. Seven of them were working as Thatchers and some of their wives and daughters were earning extra money at home as ‘straw platters’. using special tools, straw gleaned from the fields after harvest was split, flattened and woven into strips that were sold to firms which made straw hats.
One branch of the family took over America farm.
in this picture they are harvesting cabbage seed by hand in 1939
At another small farm in Coggeshall Road, Nathan Scillitoe was also growing crops for seed.
George Scillitoe, who was born in 1869, left school at the age of only nine and went to work as a household servant in the house called Chandlers in Upper Holt Street.
George sang in the church choir for seventy-seven years, an unbroken record commemorated by a carved bench which stands in the church porch.
Some of George’s gandchildren and great granchildren still live in the villageso, as far as Earls Colne is concerned, the Scillitoes have the tallest family tree.