Edwin Luckraft : Pawnbroker

Edwin, born 1824 in East Stonehouse, son of Joseph Luckraft, of Maker, was a pawnbroker in Duke Street, Plymouth in the 1850’s. His father had been an artist, and his son took over the pawnbroking business.

I recently made contact with Edwin’s descendants, and finally linked in Gwendoline Luckraft, the artist and illustrator of children’s books, who painted in Newton Abbot School of Art in 1924, aged 22. She was Edwin’s granddaughter, and had 11 sisters and one brother. Does anyone know where she might have gone, and if any work of hers survives?

Her sisters, with their birth dates, were Beatrice 1879, Adelaide 1880, Mabel 1881, Hannah Florence 1883, Ethel 1884, Annie 1885, Hilda 1887, Dorothy 1889, Winifred 1891, Mildred 1892, Olive 1894, and Phyllis 1890. Marjorie Gwendoline herself was born in 1890, and brother Edwin Montague in 1883. The births of all these 13 children were registered in the Plympton district. Her brother, the third in a line of Edwins, married a woman in Lambeth, London in 1905, where his three children were born.

Edwin’s brother, Joseph Luckraft, born 1832, was a seaman in 1851 at the census, but by 1897 he was listed as a Bird and Animal Preserver, a taxidermist, at 103 Union Street, East Stonehouse, Plymouth. Does anyone know anything about this interesting and talented family?