Walter Newbon, the patriarch of the London branch of the Newbon family, arrived in the capital as a 16-year-old apprentice baker. It is a great stroke of luck that he made his way to London because the records there are so extensive. His apprenticeship indenture is the record that reveals his family’s home.

Walter was baptised on January 10th 1750 in the parish church of King’s Cliffe,  He was the 4th of the 5 surviving children (and the 3rd surviving son) of William Newbon and  his wife Ann (formerly Swepston), who had been married at King’s Cliffe in 1740. It was common practice at this time to provide for the future of elder sons (i.e. the principal heirs) at home in the family business and to send younger sons away to a major town to be apprenticed to a trade and thus to give them the best possible start in life, as happened in Walter’s case.

We know from Walter’s apprenticeship indenture that his father William was a miller. Most members of the Newbon family at this time were bakers (and had been for many generations) and it is easy to imagine the bakers and millers of the family working closely together. It seems rather fitting that into the 20th century their descendants, while no longer bakers by profession, were still members of the City of London Livery Company of Bakers. Another family tradition seems to have been christening sons with the name Walter – the first Walter appears in the family in 1698 and there was a Walter Newbon in ever single generation of the family until Walter Thomas’s son Walter Francis (Joe) Newbon died in 1942, the last of that long line!

Members of the Newbon family can be found in King’s Cliffe for over a century before Walter Newbon’s baptism in 1750, members of his family can be found in the village of King’s Cliffe. Several members of the Newbon family can also be found in neighbouring villages, in particular Fotheringhay and Apethorpe, at various times during the late 1600s and early 1700s. The earliest reference to the Newbon family in King’s Cliffe is the marriage of Richard Newbon and Anne Whitehead, which took    

place on November 9th 1626. It is not yet known where Richard (who we can assume was Walter’s great-great-great-grandfather) was born and thus where the roots of the family in the Tudor age lay buried.