Friends of Hastings Cemetery

James Rock Senior

First Wife - Catherine  Hawkins

Second Wife - Mary Ann Bury (Widow)

Here lie

The mortal remains of

Mary Ann

Wife of

James Rock

Who departed this life

October 14th 1861

Aged 76 Years

Simply resting on the unmerited
mercy of God through the atonement
of our Lord Jesus Christ.

'Her end was peace'

Also of James Rock

Who died November 8th 1866

Aged 75 Years

'Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel’

James Rock Junior

First Wife - Helen Reid

Second Wife – Sarah Ward

Helen

The Loving and beloved wife of

James Rock, the Younger

Died at Newport, Isle of Wight

December 18 1862, Aged 39

Years, and is buried here

'Looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto Eternal Life’

Also

James Rock

Who entered into rest

November 27, 1897

Aged 79 Years

'So He bringeth them unto their desired haven
And afterward receive me to glory.'

AR B13 and 14  - Headstones by Burchell.

James Rock was the fifth child of William and Lydia Rock, born in Chelsfield  Kent, 1791; was apprenticed in 1803 as a blacksmith (his father’s trade) to Gowar’s coachbuilders in East London, where he married Catherine Hawkins in 1817; James jnr.was born in 1818, the only one of their three children to survive to adulthood.  Catherine died in 1821.

The family moved to Hastings in 1822, and in 1823 he married a widow, Mary Anne Bury.  James set up his business, recorded in 1828 as ‘a coach manufactory consisting of a large front shop, workshop behind and a forge, with working loft over the whole’, in the America Ground area, as a tenant of Thomas Breeds, at £52 p.a.  James Rock therefore became one of those given a seven year lease, expiring in 1835, when the whole America Ground area was ordered to be cleared.  By 1831, with his business flourishing, Rock became a freeman of Hastings, with 275 others, in a mass increase of the voting population.

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