John Kyte Collett 1836-1933

The name Colet can be traced back to France before the Norman invasion of 1066 and appears in the Roll of Battle Abbey, and after the conquest the family throve in many parts of Britain. The name was not anglicised to Collett until the 16th century, but the family traits continued; always trading at home and overseas, amassing fortunes and becoming Lords of Manors, innovators and philanthropists. 

The earliest known ancestor of John Kyte Collett was Thomas Collett of Over Slaughter (now Upper Slaughter) in Gloucestershire who died in 1538. In the early 1800’s a descendant of his, Robert Hanman Collett (1809-1838), born in Bourton-on-Water, Glos., came to Shepton Mallet as assistant to his father, Robert Collett (1780-1857) who was the town’s Registrar, and also Gloucester born.
 
Young Robert Hanman Collett married a Shepton girl, Ann Speed, by whom he had a son John Kyte, who was born in 1836, and a daughter Ann Mary, born 1838. Both children were born in Longbridge House, Cowl Street, where John Hanman Collett ran an academy for young gentlemen. The son was christened John Kyte because ‘Kyte’ became a family name when John Kyte’s grandfather Robert (who became a Registrar in Shepton Mallet) married Marian Kyte in 1807, who predeceased her husband by some eight years. 
 
Robert Hanman’s early death left Julia Collett a widow with two young children aged one and two years respectively, and she moved from Cowl Street to a much smaller house in Garston Street, where she opened a small grocery shop. The census 1851 shows seven Colletts living in the town, including Julia and her two children, her father-in-law, Robert Collett, now a widower, and yet at seventy years of age, still holding the position of Registrar and living in High Street with a daughter Lucy, described as a milliner and dressmaker. Also living in High Street was Ann Collett, described as a servant.  
 
John Kyte Collett attended the local Grammar School in Charlton Road, then described as ‘one of the best in the country’. In later years John still recalled the family’s struggle against poverty. As a teenager he was apprenticed to a linen draper in Bristol, but when his mother and sister moved to Cardiff, he joined them there and opened a small grocery business in St Mary Street. He also became a senior partner of the (then) well-known firm of Collett, Whitefield and Co., wholesale provision merchants, trading internationally, much like many of his ancestors. 
 
John Collett married a farmer’s daughter, Sarah Ann Orledge Reeves, at Pilton Church in 1869. The marriage certificate lists Ann’s father as Thomas W Reeves, Yeoman, and John’s father as Robert Collett (decd). John Kyte Collett’s siste Ann Mary married a Rev Cruickshank (Baptist Clergyman). One of their descendents now live in New Zealand. 

Whilst in Shepton Mallet, schoolboy John Kyte and his cousin, John Lewis (also born in Cowl Street and founder of the modern-day John Lewis Partnership) was evicted on several occasions, together with many other children, from a field attached to Langhorne House (now St Paul’s School), which was then owned by Mr Garton, owner of the Anglo Bavarian Brewery.