Captain Gilbert Sidney Jackson appears to have left the army on honourable terms. He retired from the regular army (86th Foot) in 1871, and was then a captain in the militia (5th Essex Rifles) until he resigned from that post in 1878.
As you will know he married Susannah Laws, the young widow of a marine engineer, in 1878. Per the electoral register for 1885 he was then paying rent of 6/- a week to Susannah's mother, Mary Ann Munro, for two unfurnished rooms in her house at 259 West Ferry Road.
Thank you! I'm actually relieved to hear he left on honourable terms
How did you find out about the 5th Essex Rifles?
Thanks also for pointing me to the electoral register, which I seem to have completely ignored even though it's right there on Ancestry. I had seen from a previous census that Susannah's mother was letting rooms and that Susannah was living with her after being widowed, so it had crossed my mind that they might have met in this way.
I wonder now if Gilbert and Susannah are not such an unexpected pairing as I first thought. Clearly Susanna's mother (whose husband had also been a marine engineer) came to be a property owner, which may have been more than Gilbert's own mother could have said for herself at the same time. It's also dawned on me that Gilbert's father Henry was a sixth son, so the Jackson money probably got him as far as his army commission and no further (I do believe his wife Georgina was from a wealthy merchant family, but whether that money was still around at the time of her marriage, or what happened to it after that, I don't know).
