William BLISS (1844-1925)

William Bliss became a good friend of Julius Sladden when the latter went to work in Chipping Norton in the early 1870s.

William Bliss (1844-1925) was born at Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, on 2nd March 1844, the second of four children and only son of William Bliss, a woollen manufacturer, and his wife, Esther (née Cleaver).  William became a woollen manufacturer like his father, joining the family firm of “William Bliss & Son”.
On 17th August 1869 William married Fanny Elizabeth Cordeux at St Giles, Northampton.  William and Fanny had six sons:  William Lindsey (1870-1942), Herbert Francis (1872-1956), Henry Ernest (1873), Bernard Robert (1876-1948), John Sidney (1878-1943) and Christopher Guy (1879).

At the time of the 1871 census, William and Fanny lived on New Street with their first-born son; also in the household was Fanny’s sister and three servants.  Next door lived William’s older sister, Anne Maria Flint, and her family.  Her husband, Samuel, was also a woollen manufacturer.

According to a biography of his sister, Esther Burrows, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, when their father died in 1883, there was insufficient money for his son to run the firm.  A notice in The London Gazette of 11th January 1884 reveals that the partnership between William and his brother-in-law, Samuel Flint, “carrying on business as Clothiers and Woollen Manufacturers at Chipping Norton under the style or firm of William Bliss & Son” was dissolved by mutual consent on 29th December 1883.

William, by now in sole charge of the firm, and his family were still at New Street in 1891.  In about late 1900 he retired and, by the time of the 1901 census, he and Fanny and one of their sons was living at 8 The Croft, Castle Street, Wallingford.  In 1911 they were at Shilingford, Wallingford.

William died at Shillingford on Christmas Eve 1925.