ABSTRACT
Joseph Crabtree’s father was identified by Cadwallader in his 1976 Oration as ‘Fluellen Crabtree, a cobbler’. There are, I believe, two minor errors here. First, his name may well have been pronounced ‘Fluellen’ b y monogl ot Englishm en, but his true nam e was ‘Llewe Secondly, although he was undoubtedly ‘very much into leather’, to use the modern idiom, he was not a mere cobbler. Smith informed us in 1959 that he was a civil servant, and that was nearer the mark. Llewellyn Crabtree in fact was a Conner, or to be more precise an Aleconner, a person who was both an excise man and an expert in assessing the quality of ale by utilizing the physical properties of leather.
