1792 survey is as occupier of ‘A Garden taken out of Further Field', which in fact was directly across the road from the cottage. He died, aged fifty-seven, in 1806.
   There had appeared upon the scene in the seventeen-nineties another John Elcombe, who was a farmer, but not apparently a successful one. Early in the new century, he joined the ranks of the labourers. This John Elcombe had married a girl named Nary Jeal at Offham; she, from 1796 to 1802, bore him a daughter, Harriet,’ and three sons, Richard, George and John. Richard died tragically; he was the thirteen year old boy for whom the cause of death was given as ‘Strangulation’. Happier was the lot of George, who was for very many years the Ash schoolmaster, a task which he long combined with that of parish clerk. After James Buggs’

time, he also became the postmaster. In 1871, when he was a year into his seventies, George was apparently in harness in all three of those vocation.
   Another role for which families like the Elcombes were inevitably called in aid was that of enumerator at the decennial censuses. George Elcombe was only one year old when the first of those censuses was taken, but at some subsequent time his services were enlisted and he certainly took the census for the major part of Ash in 1841, when names were recorded for the first time, and on the three succeeding occasions. In 1851, his son Alfred, who was then aged nineteen, joined in the fray; he was enumerator for the parish of Ridley and, that not being a wholly absorbing task, for the easterly reaches of Ash.