I’m pleased to announce the publication of my first book, Extraordinary Ordinary Women ~ of North Wiltshire, released at the end of March 2024 by Hobnob Press.
The book extends and expands on some of the women’s stories I’ve already featured in The Women Who Made Me project, and adds in more from across North Wiltshire – Chippenham, Corsham, Malmesbury, Devizes, Bradford-on-Avon, Cricklade, All Cannings, Winterbourne Bassett, and more. Many of them are exclusive to the book, and haven’t been put onto the blog.
Through twenty case studies, the book takes in inspirational teachers, gutsy landladies, pioneering social workers, a war hero with her beloved hounds, mental health patients at the mercies of Victorian care, a herbalist accused of murder, a nun who was stoned in the street, a young woman who eloped with her adoptive uncle, a beauty influencer with an acidic tongue, and a charwoman who hid her pregnancy and suffered the consequences.
It’s been beautifully illustrated by artist Lucia Lovatt.
Musical prodigy Clara excelled on the piano and as a vocalist, and was entertaining on the concert platform in fashionable mid-19th century Bath by the age of nine and soon gracing stages in London and the provinces. As a young woman though, she had tired of the attention, so eloped with her sweetheart Joseph – another fine musician, but alas not so fine at business ventures, so her musical talents earned her family’s living in possibly the most genteel way possible.
She’d been born in 1844 in Widcombe, Bath, but for some reason her parents Major John Henry and Emily Diana MacFarlane (née Cottle) had opted to have her baptised at Temple Church in Bristol a couple of years later. This may have been on account of them not actually being married at the time, though they did sort that out by 1854. Her father called himself a professor of the pianoforte, sometimes a professor of music, but at this sort of time there was very little regulation for these sorts of qualification claims and he most likely took his professorship from the fact that he played well enough to be able to teach others. His father before him had been a banker, and he’d been brought up in London, so he had the means and background to be able to study music seriously.
Clara was her parents’ oldest child, and was followed by two sisters – Kate and Marion – and later two brothers, Walter and Alexander. Marion died at about 10 months old, but the rest of her siblings survived. Her widowed paternal grandmother lived close by while she was growing up, and taught children in an infants’ school, while her father took on piano pupils.
Her first reported performance was in Corsham, Wiltshire, just after Christmas in 1855, at a vocal and instrumental concert directed by her father. She was purported to be nine years old, but in reality had probably recently turned ten. The Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette said:
“The performance of Miss Clara Macfarlane, the talented juvenile pianiste and vocalist, elicited great applause from the audience, who were surprised at the powers of so young a performer.”
In March the following year she was part of a benefit concert for the Nightingale Fund at the Guildhall in Bath, where her father had invited the nobility, gentry and inhabitants of the city to hear her play alongside musicians from the Bristol Philharmonic Concerts and the Band of the North Somerset Yeomanry Cavalry in full uniform. The Nightingale Fund, though officially funded in 1857, was earlier than that part of fundraising undertaken for Florence Nightingale towards the end of the Crimean War.
Clara’s father again conducted, and she was again supposed to be only nine years old. The newspapers, in this case London’s Morning Herald, were again gushing in their praise.
“A very interesting portion of the entertainment consisted of the pianoforte performances of Miss Clara Macfarlane, a child only nine years of age. The audience were most agreeably surprised at the powers of execution and the musical genius which she manifested. She performed, in an admirable manner, two fantasias, one of airs from L’Elisir, and the other from Lucrecia Borgia. We have no hesitation in predicting for this child much future fame.”
Subsequent prominent concerts, of which there are several, make no mention of her age – being in single digits was clearly a selling point, and once she’d passed that it wasn’t remarked upon. Instead, she’s referred to as a “juvenile pianiste”. Press reviews are no less glowing, however old she was. There were performances at the Bath Guildhall, the Cardiff Assembly Rooms, the New Hall (now the Neeld Hall) in Chippenham and the Court Hall in Trowbridge before she was twelve years old.
The 1861 census found the family living at Nile Street in Bath, with her father describing himself as an organist – so, in addition to teaching the piano, arranging and conducting concerts, and playing the cornet à pistons for solos, as several concert reviews report, he also had a hand in church music at that time. Clara was fourteen and described as a scholar, so was continuing her education beyond the minimum – though her studies could just have been musical.
As the 1860s wound on, reports of Clara’s musical prowess continued, although her young age is mentioned less and less in reports as her abilities became slightly remarkable in the context of her peers. Her father around now owned a music shop on Pultney Bridge in Bath, selling instruments and sheet music. There were notable performances in Midsomer Norton and Bristol, and she was often appearing alongside her father’s work. Away from the reported concerts, she was probably in a world of choral societies, private appearances, endless rehearsals and constant practice, and after spending so much of her childhood as her father’s display, this may have been wearing a little thin. Her mother also seems to have died at some point in the 1860s, as by 1871 her father was calling himself a widower. An exact record for this has proved illusive, however.
Around the concert circuits, Clara had met singer Joseph Goold, who hailed from Corsham – just a few miles east of Bath. He was one of the sons of a prosperous tan-yard and quarry owner in the tiny Wiltshire town, and as such would have been on a similar class footing to Clara. He also had a beautiful bass singing voice. The family story goes that Joseph approached Major John Henry Macfarlane and asked for her hand in marriage, which was refused in no uncertain terms. Her marriage would effectively end her performing career – in respectable circles at this time, and even more so as the 19th century wore on, married women did not publicly appear on concert stages, no matter how talented they were. Their talents went into their new family, and they could perform privately amongst friends, but a stage like those Clara frequented was frowned upon.
Either her love for Joseph was strong, or she had deep dissatisfaction with her life as it was, but taking matters into their own hands, Clara one day in early 1864 told her family that she was off to visit her dress maker… and instead eloped with Joseph in Corsham. She would have been around 20, and as such technically too young to marry without a parents’ permission or license, but many young couples at this time fudged their ages slightly, and it was a common practice in the church and registry offices to not probe too hard.
Family stories say that the newly-wed couple’s grand plan was to set up a book shop in Swindon to support their new family. Swindon at this time was still in two parts – Old Swindon (now known as Old Town) at the top of the hill, and New Swindon which was growing around the railway works on the flat land beneath. New Swindon was booming, and it may have seemed an exciting prospect to found a new business. In reality, though they were living in the area for a while, this venture seems to have not lasted very long at all. Clara had her first child, daughter Daisy, in the November of the following year, who was registered in Highworth – a smaller community just to the north – and she was followed eighteen months later by a second daughter named Kate.
A few months after Daisy’ birth there is a mention of one of the final public performances attributed to Clara in the newspapers. She and Joseph appeared together with other members of Corsham musical societies at an annual soiree in April 1866, where she sang and played piano alongside him. This event was repeated in 1868. This may have been just private enough for Clara to appear, as there are other married women on the bill, and they probably needed the money.
By the time her third child – Edith – arrived, in the summer of 1869, Clara and Joseph had made a big change and undertaken a move to Nottingham. This was about 150 miles away from Corsham. She’s mentioned as having done a tiny bit of performing, bumping along at community entertainments, in Nottingham in October of that year.
They’d gone to Nottingham so that Joseph could set himself up as a soda water manufacturer. This industry was experiencing a bit of a boom, as the Victorian temperance movement was growing. Carbonated drinks, like sparking water and ginger beer, had a similar sensation in the mouth as a fermented beverage, but none of the pesky alcohol. They were therefore promoted as a more wholesome alternative, particularly around some non-conformist church movements. Joseph, who called himself an inventor, and in 1871 was employing three men and a woman at his plant near Mansfield Grove in Nottingham, could have made it big with this new business venture.
He didn’t. At some point in the 1870s the manufactory went south. Clara had another baby, Alice Bertha, in July 1871, bringing their quota of small children to four. His business, though it’s unclear exactly when it failed, was not mentioned in the Post Office directory of Nottingham published in 1876.
Instead, to keep their family afloat, they appear to have begun to rely on Clara’s talents as a pianist, which were relatively unknown in Nottingham before this time. Despite the socially uncomfortable issues around married women performing, she took to the stage at an entertainment in April 1872, where the Nottingham Journal reported:
“We ought not, perhaps, to conclude without stating that Mrs Goold, who, we believe, appeared last night for the first time in public as a pianist, in Nottingham, acquitted herself with remarkable efficiency at her instrument in the very difficult music she had to play. We have reason to know that many at the concert will be glad to have an opportunity of hearing her again.”
She was able to build upon this exposure, and by 1881 they’d had five more children – Ernest, Amy, Irene, Stanley and Vivian – had downsized their accommodation quite considerably, and she had established herself as a teacher of music on the Nottingham scene. Her brother Walter also went to Nottingham and worked as a music teacher. On the 1881 census her husband Joseph described himself as a druggist (which was possibly related to his soda water interests) and an author of scientific works. Throughout the 1880s he was contributing to discussions on the construction and pitch of scales in musical publications of the day, and doing work on harmonics and vibrations – which had a basis in maths and physics.
However scholarly and inventive the work, it did not pay the family’s bills. So, Joseph became a book keeper and a clerk, and Clara continued to take in many piano pupils. They moved closer to the newly-opened university college in the city, possibly so Joseph could undertake his research closer to other deep thinkers. It appears that he also occasionally worked as a piano tuner, which would have influenced his research on pitch and harmonics.
As their family grew up, Clara’s daughters joined her in piano teaching to contribute to the family income. Adverts in Nottingham newspapers from the late 1880s promote “Mrs Goold and daughters” who offer piano tuition and children’s singing classes. Joseph also offered classes in music theory and harmony.
Her daughter Kate married young, to an engineer in the Public Works Department in India who whisked her away to a city in the east of that country, but the rest of the children stayed very much at home. By the time of the 1891 census the whole elder portion of the family were referred to as professors of music – so, though she might have wished to escape the role her musical abilities put her in for her entire childhood, Clara’s talents had brought her full circle and were an important far of the family’s financial structure.
Despite their residence and work in Nottingham, Clara and Joseph and their brood seem to have spent considerable time back at home with his family in Wiltshire. It was here that eldest daughter Daisy had got to know a fellow musician, Herbert Spackman, whose family were very prominent in Corsham. She eventually followed him to New Zealand, and married him in Wellington.
At home in Nottingham, Clara had started to take in resident piano pupils to train as her house gradually emptied, though by 1894 only Joseph was being referred to as a music teacher in business and street directories. Her daughter Kate was widowed in Cuttack, India, in 1892, so returned home to Nottingham with her tiny son, and lived with them and taught piano too. They lived at Stratford House, in the town’s Shakespeare Street, and operated as a family-run music school, with their unmarried daughters coming and going, and adding to their pupil capacity for the next thirty years or so. Clara’s talents, which she passed on in abundance, kept the household solvent and operating well.
Joseph invented a harmonograph around 1901, which was published in a book on harmonic vibration and vibration figures in 1909. This was a twin elliptic pendulum which generated Lissajous curves – a graph of a system of parametric equations. This was his only published research or invention after many years working in harmonics. So, though he was working, the family seems to have relied very much on the solid skills of Clara’s abilities to maintain their livelihood.
Daughter Kate remarried in 1905, Daisy eventually had three daughters (including Heather Muriel Spackman, who later became Heather Tanner), Irene became a governess and Amy became a school teacher, but Edith and Bertha mostly stayed at home for the duration and taught piano alongside their parents. Son Vivian seemed to swap careers as often as his father did, taking in mechanical engineering and being a nurseryman, but eventually settled on architecture. Her two other sons both took up religion, but while Stanley was a reverend in Nottingham and later Suffolk, Ernest had been a schoolteacher at first but then moved on to the church in South Africa.
A 1905 advert in the Nottingham Guardian promotes Clara and Herbert’s music teaching in piano, singing, organ and harmony, and says that they’re working alongside one of their daughters – though it isn’t specific which, and could have been Alice or Bertha. They also say that they’re a school for the “Virgil Clavier technique”, which was a way of improving piano fingering by practicing silently so as not to disturb the neighbours.
In 1916, Clara’s father died in Bath. John Henry MacFarlane was described as “Bath’s Oldest Musician” in his obituary in the Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, which described some of his teaching methods in the words of his old pupils. He reputedly would rap pupils on the knuckles with a stick if the scales were played wrong or someone sang a flat for a sharp. Although nothing out of the ordinary for music teaching in this era, Clara must also have been subjected to this treatment as a child. It is not known if it was a technique she used herself with her own piano pupils, but it seems likely. The obituary also reveals that Clara had come to be with her father until the end of his life.
Their grandson, son of their daughter Kate, was killed on active service during the First World War. He had been an officer.
Clara and Joseph remained in Nottingham until around 1922/3, when they retired back to Corsham. They celebrated their diamond wedding anniversary at the residence of their son-in-law Herbert Spackman, at Rose Cottage in Priory Street, and the occasion was reported upon in the Wiltshire Times. They appear to have moved in with Daisy and Herbert and their family so they could be taken care of in old age.
Joseph died, aged 90, in Corsham in 1926, and was celebrated in the newspapers as a musician and scientist/inventor. Typically for the time, his obituaries only mention the occupations of his sons and not his daughters, and do not even mention Clara by name – she is just “the widow”.
After Joseph’s death, Clara is known to have lived quietly in Corsham during her retirement and widowhood, occasionally helping out her daughters in their piano teaching.
When Clara died in the summer of 1939, she was given a glowing obituary in both Nottingham and Wiltshire Newspapers. The Nottingham Journal describes her as “one of Nottingham’s foremost pianoforte and singing teachers in pre-war days, and among her pupils were many men and women who have since become famous in the world of music”, but doesn’t actually name any of them. She was remembered as the teacher of piano teacher Alice Hogg, who was well-known in Nottingham at that time.
Her two piano-teacher daughters continued to educate the children of Corsham on keyboards through the 20th century, so her musical legacy is still felt in the town today. But of her remaining grand-children, it is Heather Muriel Spackman, later Heather Tanner, who is the best known – she was a writer and author, and a peace campaigner.
Many towns across the British Isles had Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) auxiliary hospitals in the run up to and during the first world war, usually voluntarily staffed by a large collection of respectable women from the area. These were invariably the wives and daughters of successful businessmen, professionals and gentry, who were doing their bit for the war effort by caring for and nursing trainloads of wounded soldiers brought directly from the battlefields.
Though women of these social classes had often volunteered for good causes for the benefit of their town during the 19th and early 20th centuries, the establishment of the VADs was one of the first times this had been done in an organised manner. The mobilisation of this large group of women also helped to challenge the social idea that respectable women shouldn’t really work, even if these roles were actually voluntary.
These hospitals were run by a “Commandant”, a woman or man who had taken charge of the whole local organisation, and in Malmesbury’s case this was Miss (Emily) Gertrude Luce. At the time the first world war began, she was around 43, unmarried, and living at The Knoll on the outskirts of the town.
Nearby, other women of similar social class to Gertrude took on the commandant role for their town’s VAD. Devizes’ auxiliary hospital was run by Daisy (actually Margaret Emily) Thornely, wife of a solicitor based at a big house at Nursteed. Daisy, who was of British parentage but actually born in Germany, was only the second woman in Wiltshire to raise a VAD. Melksham’s VAD was run by Mabel Fuller of Great Chalfield Manor, dairy farmer and wife of the manager of the town’s Avon India Rubber company. Commandant Helena Wilson, of the Chippenham VAD auxiliary hospital, was the wife of a doctor and town councillor and lived in the town’s picturesque St Mary Street. She lost all three of her sons during the war. Lady Ethel Christian Methuen of Corsham Court served as Corsham VAD’s commandant.
So, against this background, Gertrude Luce seems to have been a fairly typical example of a VAD commandant. However, she seems to have gone above and beyond the normal expectations of this role, taking on many more duties and auspices than were expected. Each public role she took upon seems to have been laced with kindness, and a compassionate desire to help the underprivileged and society for the better, and for this she stands out as remarkable.
Gertrude was born in Malmesbury in September 1871, the eldest child of William Hollis Luce Esq, and Emily (Milly) Sopwith, who had married in London the year before. She gained two sisters in quick succession, followed by a brother who died in infancy. The family was completed by another brother, a sister, and a youngest brother.
In the run up to his marriage, and Gertrude’s birth, her father had been an agent for tea import and export business Dent and Co. in Foochow, China. Today, known as Fuzhou, the city is capital of Fujian province in South East China. There had been a British colonial presence in the city since at least 1846, with it becoming an important Protestant missionary base – and therefore a good place to establish a tea exportation business. Though initially from Malmesbury, he had been living and working in Fuzhou since the 1850s.
Westerners involved in the Chinese tea trade in the 19th century
Dent and Co had reduced their operations there in 1869, which may have been his impetus to return to London. He retained property interest in the area though, alongside investments elsewhere. Gertrude’s mother Milly, 20 years his junior, had also spent time in China, which is presumably where she had met William Hollis Luce. Milly was known to have had a keen interest in Oriental embroidery which she had brought back from the far east.
William Hollis Luce’s prominence in Fuzhou led to Gertrude’s birth being reported upon in the London and China Telegraph, alongside that of her sisters Jane in 1873 and Ursula in 1875. Her ill-fated brother’s birth was announced in the North Wiltshire Herald in 1876, and his namesake Thomas’s birth the following year.
The family lived at The Knoll, at Burton Hill, where William Hollis worked as a magistrate and justice of the peace. His family had had the house built, by his father Thomas Luce – a banker who had operated on Malmesbury High Street and also at the Bank of London, and later served as an MP.
The Knoll in Malmesbury as it currently appears
In addition to Gertrude’s brother Thomas, she had two more siblings – Amy in 1878, and William in 1880. They seem to have enjoyed a comfortable childhood, with a large house that had been modernised in the 1870s, and various servants to look after them.
One incident, involving Gertrude’s sister Ursula, made the newspapers and shines a light upon the sort of childhood she and her siblings had. Ursula, with sisters Gertrude and Jane, was out walking in a meadow with their governess Miss Beames in the July of 1880, when she tripped in long grass and fell into a river. Their governess attempted to rescue the little girl, but found the water too deep. The shouting of Gertrude and Jane alerted some men working nearby, who were able to save Ursula. She was brought home, unconscious, and was attended by Doctor Kinneir who succeeded in reviving her. However, while this was going on, another child elsewhere succumbed to the effects of drowning for want of the same doctor.
The 1881 census reveals Governess Beames to have actually been Maria Somme, who had been born in Prussia. She would have had charge of the formal education of Gertrude, Jane and Ursula, with Thomas, Amy and William in the care of the two nursemaids also employed by the household. The servants of The Knoll were completed by a butler, cook, two housemaids and a kitchen-maid.
As the family grew up, the boys would have been sent away to school – Clifton College in Bristol, reportedly – while the girls continued to be educated at home. They were known to have holidayed at Tenby in Pembrokeshire in the summer of 1886, as they are listed in the notable arrivals column of the Tenby Observer.
As was expected of a young woman of her class and background, Gertrude made her formal debut into society in January 1889, at the age of 18. Her mother held a ball for her at The Knoll, where she wore “a simple dress of white embroidered tulle trimmed with snowdrops” according to the publication John Bull. Other young women from nearby families were invited, including Muriel Howard of Charlton Park, later Lady Coventry, who wore white tulle with a broad pink sash.
Gertrude would have worn a dress similar to this when making her debut
However, the expected outcome of a debut should have been an eventual marriage proposal, and this does not appear to have been the case for Gertrude. The 1891 census has her aged 19 and unmarried, still living at The Knoll, and the 1901 census is no different. Whether she remained unmarried was by design or a lack of opportunity is not remarked upon by any available document. This lack of marriage, and therefore the formal household duties as a wife, may have been an impetus for her to turn her energies towards worthy public works, and those less privileged than her.
Her youngest brother William was killed at Diamond Hill in the conflict in South Africa in 1900, and a window dedicated to him at Malmesbury Abbey the following year. Though there was another older son – Thomas – who had been given the education and societal trappings expected of a young man of his class (for example, he was given the freedom of the city of London as a member of the Girdlers’ Company, like his father before him, in 1903), he went out to Ceylon – now Sri Lanka – on business and then farmed in Shropshire. The absence of her younger brothers may have further strengthened Gertrude’s position as the oldest child, particularly representing her family in the local community.
The William Scott Luce window at Malmesbury Abbey
Alongside her sisters, who also never married, the Miss Luce name is scattered across local organisations across Malmesbury. Jane Luce was involved in choral competitions as the honourable secretary of the Wiltshire Arts and Crafts Association, chair of the local branch of the Women’s Conservative Association, and later district commissioner for the girl guides. Amy Luce organised waste paper collection as part of the war effort during the First World War. Ursula Luce was active in town dramatic and musical events.
The Government’s decision to organise Voluntary Aid Detachments in case of future conflicts seems to have become a turning point for Gertrude’s life, and it is at this point she becomes extremely visible in the public life of Malmesbury.
She raised the VAD in Malmesbury soon after 1909, after the Army Council had published the Scheme for Voluntary Aid. These guidelines stipulated that the women’s detachment should have a male or female Commandant, a male or female Quartermaster, a female superintendent or matron – who should be a trained nurse – and then twenty other female members, at least four of which should be qualified in cooking. Male detachments had different rules, and were larger. Once 70 per cent of the required members had been registered, and had begun training, the detachment could be registered. Gertrude’s detachment was the 22nd of such in Wiltshire.
In March 1912, having been ill for a while, Gertrude’s father died. He was 90 years old. He was buried at Malmesbury Abbey, with Gertrude and two of her sisters (Ursula is not mentioned in reports) and her brother in attendance. Milly Luce was now ipso facto in charge of the household at The Knoll, but in practice the role seems to have fallen to Gertrude. He left over £61,000, of which each of his children received £200 initially with the rest staying with Gertrude’s mother Milly for her life, and then the remainder would be equally shared.
Despite Gertrude having initially raised the Voluntary Area Detachment, when the First World War was actually declared in August 1914 Eleanor Countess of Suffolk offered up space at Charlton Park for an auxiliary hospital, so was initially Commandant of this Charlton detachment, and Gertrude’s Malmesbury detachment joined this effort along with the VADs from Crudwell.
Charlton Park, near Malmesbury
When the countess went to join her husband in India in October 1915, the Charlton Park ward closed and organisation fell again to Gertrude.
As Commandant of the Auxiliary Hospital effort, all major decisions would have fallen to Gertrude, though she would not have been in charge of medical and nursing services – as those would have fallen to doctors and the matron respectively. The hospital matron was Martha Alice Mary Wellicome, who was awarded a Royal Red Cross by the King after the war was over.
Gertrude would have made the important decisions about how the hospital worked day-to-day, and how her staff were deployed. The volunteer nurses at her hospital were local women, usually those well-off enough to not have to work for their living, and therefore have time to spare, and may have felt that working at an auxiliary hospital was an easier commitment to make to the war effort than full training and deployment at a military hospital under the Red Cross. These nurses also included her sisters Jane, Ursula and Amy, but they would not have had special treatment as formality was part of the hospital remit.
Her detachment staff would each have volunteered for a number of hours a week, and all have undergone Red Cross training, which included first aid (for example bandaging and wound care), home nursing, hygiene and cookery, and Gertrude would have taken part in this too. Some of this may have taken place on a hospital ward, and other training in halls designated training centres. Their duties would have included domestic duties like sweeping, dusting, polishing, cleaning, washing crockery, sorting linen and any nursing duties allotted by the matron. There would have also been laundry and food preparation duties under the head cooks, along with food service.
The patients coming in to be treated at Gertrude’s hospital would have arrived by train as the need arose. They would not have had life-threatening injuries, so instead needed convalescent time which the hospital could provide. Often these wards could be quite lively, with games and songs for the recovering soldiers, concerts performed by townspeople, and trips out as the patients’ health improved.
The Malmesbury VAD ward during World War 1. One of Gertrude’s sisters is in the picture.
Away from her hospital duties at this time, Gertrude was also head of the executive committee for welcoming Belgian refugees when they arrived in Malmesbury in 1915. This raised money to help the local community to support these people in need, as more than 250,000 Belgians were displaced over the course of the war due to fierce fighting in their country and were placed in communities all over the country. In March 1915 Gertrude released an official statement, which was partially published in the North Wilts Herald:
“Thirteen more Belgians have arrived in Malmesbury, bringing the total up to 24. Three of these are at Cole Park Stables, four at the Iron Foundry, three lodging with Mr Withynian, King’s House, and three in a cottage in Holloway, taken by the committee. They are all most grateful for the hospitality shown them. Some of them have undergone great hardships in their journey from Belgium, one woman and her sons arriving in Malmesbury in only the clothes they wore, and these badly torn by barbed wire entanglements. They, with other refugees, had to walk eleven hours on end, groping their way under hedges and in ditches – sometimes up to their knees in water – in terror of being seen and shot at by the Germans. This woman has a son fighting, as is the husband of one of the other women. The committee have again gone carefully into the subject of expense, and find that the allowance made at Headquarters is the same as they had fixed on – viz., 10s per head per week for adults. They have also found, on investigating other cases where the cost of maintenance has been seemingly a good deal less, that in those cases the cost has not included coal or meat or other big items of the weekly budget… The villages of Oaksey, Little Somerford, Luckington, Brinkworth and Dauntsey have stopped payment for the present and the other villages are sending a reduced amount until the need for more arises, but the committee much hope that there will not be a great falling off, and would point out that the balance at the bank was largely made up of generous donations in lump sums of £20 or £25, this being in place of a weekly subscription. The calculation as to the number of refugees to be accommodated in Malmesbury was made upon this basis, and if the promised weekly subscriptions are now discontinued it will obviously be necessary, either to reduce that number or to curtail the period for which they can be provided for. In view of the uncertainty as to the possibly duration of the war, either alternative would be most regrettable.”
In response to the need for more beds for wounded soldiers, both from Britain and allies, as commandant Gertrude took charge of the Cottage Hospital in Malmesbury in July 1916 on behalf of the Red Cross. On top of this she organised new wards at Cranmore House – at this point the YMCA headquarters – and in Malmesbury’s Wesleyan Chapel. Burton Hill Manor House, located close to Gertrude’s home at The Knoll, was also offered as hospital space by owner Colonel Miles in 1917. This opened up many more beds for wounded personnel.
Gertrude, along with 39 other women who were VAD auxiliary hospital commandants, was awarded an OBE in the King’s Birthday Honours in June 1918. She had not known in advance that her name had been put forward for an award, and was apparently overwhelmed at both the recognition and a surprise parade held at the hospital in her honour.
The parade for Gertrude’s OBE, with her in the centre of the middle line in a square hat.
Around her, other commandants were being awarded too. Mabel Fuller, commandant of Melksham VAD was given an OBE at the same time as Gertrude. Daisy Thornely, commandant of Devizes VAD, received hers in the 1918 New Years Honours, alongside 46 other auxiliary commandants. Helena Wilson, commandant of Chippenham VAD, received an OBE in the 1919 New Year’s Honours. These awards to commandants continued into the early 1920s. So, while a great honour to be recognised for her good work during the war, Gertrude was by no means unique in being awarded a title.
When the extra wards closed in June 1919, and the Red Cross relinquished control of the Cottage Hospital, the Malmesbury VAD, with Gertrude at their head, had treated 778 wartime casualties. More awards were also on the table for members of the VAD for their work. Red Cross awards were given in April 1922 at Bowood House, for women who had given over 1,000 hours. Lady Lansdowne of Bowood gave out signed photographs as her personal thanks.
The closure of the hospital, and her OBE award, did not mean that Gertrude’s role as Commandant came to an end. She remained in the position with the Voluntary Aid Detachment until the late 1920s. This seems characteristic of the kindness and drive towards improving the world for the better that shines through all reports of Gertrude’s activities.
The official record for Gertrude, and her sisters, on the 1921 census belies all these public works and energy that the family seem to have been renowned for locally. Gertrude, Jane and Ursula are recorded as not occupied for a living, while sister Amy is tersely credited with house duties as her occupation. They were all still living at The Knoll with their mother Milly and a complement of staff – a nurse, two ladies’ maids, a cook, two housemaids, a parlourmaid and a kitchen maid. The need for a butler and footman appears to have gone from the household with the death of their father. Alongside the public service work the sisters performed from the town, they almost certainly enjoyed the society life and socialising that their class afforded them. Gertrude’s sister Amy is known to have ridden out with the Beaufort Hunt.
In 1925, Gertrude’s 47-year-old brother Thomas died in his sleep on a visit to London. Like his sisters and younger brother, he had never married, so the bulk of the family’s wealth and property now fell to Gertrude as the eldest child. Tom was buried at Malmesbury Abbey.
Malmesbury Abbey (Getty Images)
By at least 1925, on the basis of her previous connections and good works, Gertrude was regularly sitting as a magistrate for Malmesbury. In the early years of her service she is mentioned as sitting on the bench, in cases such as a habitual bicycle thief, but later into the 1930s she was pronouncing judgements. Such cases included remanding a man found in the bedroom of a daughter of a local landlord. In later years she was also a justice of the peace, and chaired the juvenile court. Malmesbury Museum also says that she was a county and district councillor, but when this occurred has not come to light, and a governor of the town secondary school for 25 years.
The late 1920s saw Gertrude take on a yet another new role, as “Lady Visitor of Institutions for Defectives in Wiltshire”. Clumsily worded even for the time, this was an appointment under the provisions of the Mental Deficiency Act 1913 to oversee care for those with mental health issues in the county at the time. Gertrude would therefore have had an official remit to visit places like the County Asylum at Devizes, and advise on the care of the patients. She wasn’t alone in this remit though, as this was alongside Mrs M Kennedy-Shaw of Teffont Magna near Salisbury, and Miss Helen Boulton of Seend.
She relinquished the role of Commandant of the 22nd Wiltshire VAD in the late 1920s, and a Miss Simmons took over the job. It seems that there were other calls on her time and expertise by this point, which may have meant re-evaluating how she gave out her skills. However, she remained involved as the organisation’s president until the late 1940s, attending meetings, training and exhibitions of their skills.
Gertrude was appointed a member of the Chippenham Area Guardians Committee in 1930, replacing Canon Westlake, who had just died. The Chippenham Area Board of Guardians had initially just been in charge of the Chippenham workhouse, but in 1930 legislation had just been passed to rename it the Chippenham Institution and the change happened that March. Malmesbury workhouse on Sherston Road then became part of the Chippenham area as a result of this reorganisation, and since Gertrude was so deeply involved in the public life of Malmesbury this would seem to have been an obvious appointment. On this committee she joined her former debutant partner of 41 years earlier, Lady Coventry, formerly Muriel Howard.
Gertrude’s mother Milly Luce died in the early summer of 1932, meaning that she was now head of the family. Five years later, her sister Jane also died, aged 65. Jane left over £21,000, including bequests to colonialism-friendly organisations the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Gertrude was an executor, as was one of their cousins.
In the run up to the Second World War she had chaired the local branch of the Air Raids Precaution Committee, and when war was actually declared in September 1939 she was again actively involved in public works and efforts to make the situation better for those more directly affected. Gertrude and remaining sisters Amy and Ursula took in a group of evacuees from London, who can be seen with the family and their servants at The Knoll on the 1939 register.
However, while much attention is paid to the children removed from London to escape the threat of bombs and air raids, The Knoll’s new occupants were considerably older. Gertrude’s evacuees were a group of mature blind women from the East End of London, removed for their vulnerability and trouble reaching a safe space in the event of an attack. This was deliberately part of Operation Pied Piper, though a section of the population that has received less coverage.
The five blind women that Gertrude and her sisters supported all appear to have come from less prosperous areas of London, and none were declared blind on earlier documents so were probably gathered together by officials rather than hailing from an institution. Widowed Elizabeth Neighbour was the eldest, at 83, and hailed from Poplar; Jewish Sarah Marks, married to Abraham who was a fish porter in Spittalfields Market, was next youngest at 67, had been born in Whitechapel and was accompanied by one of her sighted daughters for extra support; Kate Simmons, 62, was a former cigar maker from St Botolph who was widowed from fruit merchant Charles; Jessie Roper, 59, was from Bow and had been a single mother that had bounced in and out of various workhouses; and youngest was Ada Rogers, 51, another workhouse-frequenting single mother, who came from Bethnal Green.
Women in the East End of London around the time of the Second World War
It’s unknown how long this group of women spent in Malmesbury, as, like the evacuated children who went home when the expected air raids didn’t immediately materialise, they may have returned to London after a few months. And if they were evacuated again when the blitz properly began in 1940 they may have gone elsewhere. However, their housing at The Knoll in 1939 is typical of the compassionate response that Gertrude and her sisters seems to have been known for locally, and the big house afforded their guests the comforts of six servants too.
The Voluntary Aid Detachments did exist during the Second World War, but did not really run hospitals in the same way that they had during the previous conflict, so Gertrude would have been involved in their work in a different way as their president. She continued to visit hospitals for the mentally ill during the war and into the late 1940s, and there are a couple of mentions of the household advertising for new staff during the war too, including a female gardener. Gertrude and her sisters also hosted community events in their garden.
The Luce sisters seem to have gradually withdrawn from public life over the 1950s, and were getting elderly. Gertrude died in December 1962, at the age of 91, and was buried at Tetbury Hill Cemetery in Malmesbury. Ursula died in 1965, and Amy followed in 1967.
Since none of the siblings had married or had children, the ownership of The Knoll passed back up to cousins descended from Gertrude’s father’s brother. They decided to sell the property rather than keep it, and it was converted into a hotel over the next few years. It operated as a hotel until around 2014, and has since been converted into multiple domestic occupation.
References
Alder, R (2021), Unity and Loyalty, The Story of Chippenham Red Cross Hospital, The Hobnob Press
Bowser, T (1917), The Story of British VAD work in the Great War, Melrose
Clairvoyance, fortune telling and attempting to communicate with the dead have been around since time immemorable. Be it carved bones, stones, tealeaves, cards, comets, portents, or reading body language, people have sought knowledge outside their experience in order to get ahead and manage the life that’s coming, usually from a woman who was working from her parlour. But Annie Brittain, the favoured medium of Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was part of a new and particularly Victorian/Edwardian branch of clairvoyance – able to use new ways of communicating and world events to help promote her art.
However, as with anything that could be classed as vaguely mystical, many sought to discredit her work, with newspapers of the day setting up sting operations. She also, on Conan Doyle’s recommendation, worked with illusionist Harry Houdini. But he didn’t find her convincing, and publicly said so.
The jury is still out on whether particular sensitive people can actually talk to the deceased or see what’s going to happen, but Annie seems to have believed in her reported abilities wholeheartedly, alongside many other people of the age.
Her background was as unremarkable as many other women at that time. She was born Annie Arnold in the winter of 1880 in Stanley, West Yorkshire, and was the eldest of the eight children of carpenter John Arnold and his wife Hannah, née Brown. She grew up in the area, gaining a succession of brothers and sisters, but by 1898 the family had moved to Longton in Staffordshire. This may have been on account of Annie’s burgeoning talents, as Longton had a noted spiritualist church with some influence. She reported told Conan Doyle later in life, for his book The History of Spiritualism, that her psychic gifts were noticed in her childhood, and that she was said to have played with spirit children and gone into trances. Her parents, supporting her, may have brought the family to Longton to progress Annie’s abilities, and she said in later notes about her life that they became spiritualists themselves. Later newspaper reports indicate that she’d attended the Longton church since around 1895.
The 1901 census finds her living away from home, but still within Longton, as a furniture shop assistant on the town’s High Street. Two years later there is the first definite connection of Annie to the Longton Spiritualist Church. An account of a later medium, Fanny Higginson, was that she was introduced to spiritualism in 1903, when as a 14-year-old she visited the church with her aunt, and was given a message by Annie – at this stage still using the surname Arnold. According to the church records, at some point in their association Annie told Fanny that she’d become a trance medium herself, and would have a son who would go on to be a world-famous platform medium. She also, in 1905, related to her that she was talking to the spirit of Fanny’s mother. When Fanny, who had only seen her mother an hour previously, said that this couldn’t possibly be the case, she was advised to head home immediately, where she discovered that her mother had indeed died of a brain haemorrhage. In spiritualist circles this was seen as the validatory incident that proved Annie’s authenticity.
The old Longton church that Annie attended. It has since been demolished.
In June 1904, Annie married Frederick Brittain, who was five years her senior and had been working as an engineering pattern maker. He grew up in the area, and may have had links to the church, or may have come into the lifestyle of the church through his association with Annie as his working life soon began to reflect hers. Their son Thomas was born the following November, so he must have been on the way when they married. They continued to operate around the Longton area, visiting monthly, but Frederick operated a magnetic healing business in Nottingham and it’s likely that they spent most of their time there. Their card of the time referred to the couple as “Brittain’s Psychic Institutes”, with Frederick as a magnetic healer and Annie as a clairvoyant and psychometrist.
However, Annie’s growing profile as a clairvoyant and medium also led to people attempting to discredit her and claim that she was charging for false information. On 22nd August 1907 Annie and two other women were arrested and charged with unlawfully pretending to tell fortunes to deceive and impose on certain of his Majesty’s subjects. The Nottingham Evening Post originally reported the case, which was to be heard at Hanley, and then the Staffordshire Sentinel picked it up.
Annie and her co-defendants, Esther Lewis (palm reader) and Hannah Williams (card reader), faced the court in mid-September. It appears two policeman’s wives had been set up on a sting operation, and had visited all three women. They had gone to visit Annie for a reading, and had not found her sayings to be authentic (she’d got one of their mothers’ age wrong, for example), but that there had only been clairvoyance during the encounter and no question of palmistry or card reading. It was eventually, with the help of Annie’s solicitor, decided that the case against her was not strong enough for a conviction, so it was dropped. Esther and Hannah were not so lucky. The former was charged £10 and court costs, and if she couldn’t pay faced two months in prison, while the latter was charged 40 shillings and costs, and if unable to pay had to spend a month incarcerated.
The case does not have appeared to affected Annie’s business in the slightest. Over the next couple of years there are several adverts in the Staffordshire Sentinel for her services and lectures, both connected to the Longton church and other places. In 1910 she gave a talk on spirit people at the King Edward Hall in Hanley.
Staffordshire Sentinel – Friday 12 June 1908
Staffordshire Sentinel – Friday 18 March 1910
There was a further sting operation in Leek, Staffordshire, in 1910, where another policeman’s wife was sent to visit Annie to test her abilities. On this occasion, Annie was found guilty and fined £1 and costs. Receiving a conviction, even a minor one, might have been off-putting for continuing a legitimate business, but Annie continued to practice.
However, on the 1911 census, Annie does not have any profession given. This was still an era where society felt that respectable married women were not supposed to admit to working, so – in common with many other women on that document, her income was not admitted to. They were at the Hanley house, and not resident at the Nottingham one that night. Frederick’s job was given as a medical electrician – which, in combination with his previous work as a magnetic healer, probably meant that his practice involved charged magnetic fields surrounding the patient. Between them they must have had a reasonable income, as in addition to the two houses they had a resident domestic servant.
Over the next couple of years, Annie started to build her notoriety outside the Staffordshire and Nottinghamshire area, visiting other spiritualist churches around the country. By 1913 her adverts were calling her “England’s premier clairvoyante” and offering consultation hours daily from 10am until 7pm.
Staffordshire Sentinel – Friday 26 September 1913
She was again subject to a sting operation in October 1915, charged with pretending to tell fortunes alongside four other defendants. By this time, with the First World War well over a year old, and many men away fighting, people were clamouring for news of loved ones. Newspapers would have covered some of that desire, but people also turned to spiritualists and fortunes to try to hear something about those away. Mrs Emma Brown and Mrs Fanny Pickford were sent by the police in the Potteries to procure fortunes and predictions from Annie and the others.
According to the Litchfield Mercury, Annie apparently put Emma Brown’s glove under a crystal, which she then looked at and said that her husband hadn’t been wounded in the war, but instead had experienced a nervous breakdown. And that her mother-in-law didn’t like her, and hadn’t wanted her son to marry her. Emma admitted that this second part was quite true. Fanny was told that her husband would be gravely wounded in France, and would not mentally be the same man who had gone to the war. This Fanny refuted, as her husband was not wounded and was due to return the following week. A policeman named Bowler, disguised as a farmer, also visited and was warned not to associate with a horse dealer named Sam, which was not received well.
Annie and her solicitor argued that she had absolute faith in her abilities, and truly believed, having no intention to deceive. However, the stipendiary magistrate felt that fortune telling had occurred. And that “he did not believe anyone could predict the course a German bullet might take next November or December. A great public mischief might be done by these predictions about wounds to the wives and relatives of soldiers.” Annie was fined £5.5s, and the court costs.
After this second conviction, Annie and Frederick may have felt that her local reputation was irreparably damaged, so decided to move from Hanley to London. The pro-spiritualist publication Light reported that they’d taken a house at Westbourne Park Road in March 1916, and Annie’s new advert stated that she was offering seances with tea for ladies only. Frederick, in addition to his previous work, was now also offering free treatment for soldiers with nerve shock.
Light – 10 June 1916
That August, however, with the government actively pushing for married men to fight in the war, Frederick joined the Royal Air Force. He’d previously been in the army reserves, but this took him away from Annie and Thomas, and his business in London. He was put to work as a fitter, which had been his father’s profession before him, and kept on until 1919. In the meantime, Annie had another son, John but known as Jack, in early 1917. And a year later she was offering visiting spiritualist services in Lincoln, as the “renowned London medium”.
Annie had also worked for Sir Oliver Lodge, a physicist and known spiritualist believer, during the war years. It was about this time that Annie began work with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A book by Christopher Sandford reports that Annie was 47 at this time, but she would have been around 38. She may have played older, as more life experience and the wisdom of age could have helped her authenticity. Sandford says Conan Doyle first began to see her in the summer of 1918, and by his third visit in November was totally convinced. He had lost his son Kingsley at the battle of the Somme in 1917, and at this third visit Annie spoke to him in Kingsley’s voice, assuring him that he was happy. Conan Doyle’s brother Innes died in 1919, and on a further visit to Annie Kingsley assured his father they were together.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, by Henry Gates, 1927
Annie was known to go into trances during her work, and would often taken on characteristics of the people she was contacting. Like many mediums, she had a spirit guide. Annie’s was called Belle, who would often speak to her in a high twittering falsetto. She said, later in life, that many medium’s guides were people of colour, referring to the idea that spirits from non-Western cultures lived lives closer to the earth and were therefore more trustworthy with the spirit world. Annie once said that her Belle was a “Cingalee”, meaning someone from northern Sri Lanka.
Sri Lanka also figured in another of Annie’s success stories. Conan Doyle reported that while visiting Colombo, the capital, he came across a doctor who had also visited Annie after the death of his son, hoping to hear word of him. Annie relayed a message from his son that he would do very well to relocate to Colombo, and would be successful in practice there. The doctor had been considering moving to Sri Lanka before this, but had not mentioned it and Annie had no way of knowing that this was in his mind. Conan Doyle took this as an another piece of evidence for Annie’s authenticity.
Conan Doyle referred to Annie as Mrs B, perhaps as a small defence against detractors, and waxed lyrical about her abilities. His book, The History of Spiritualism, published in 1926, indicated that he’d sent mourners to her after wartime, and kept the letters he’d received back. Apparently, out of the first 100 cases he sent to her, 80 of them established contact with their dead loved one, and one woman wrote to him saying that she’d resolved to commit suicide before meeting with Annie, but after their session she left with renewed hope in her heart.
This amount of notoriety again brought the attention of those who sought to prove that Annie was a fraud. The British periodical publication Truth, whose main focus was exposing frauds, published a large article examining her, her history, and her association with Conan Doyle in April 1919. They again had someone to book an appointment to test her abilities, who did not feel satisfied with what Annie had to relate. Over the next few months there was much discussion in Truth about Conan Doyle and Annie, and the nature of mediums and seances, but interestingly at this stage there are no calls for prosecution or fining, and the discussion sticks only to the printed word. A journalist for the Sunday Express, Sidney A Moseley, also followed up on the story, and was equally dissatisfied but Conan Doyle stuck to his convictions and continued to recommend Annie. He even wrote to Truth himself, saying that Annie was not a fortune-teller, but a spirit clairvoyant, and the two were vastly different.
Truth – Wednesday 9 July 1919
It was also on Conan Doyle’s recommendation that Annie was visited by the American illusionist and escapologist Harry Houdini in 1920. He and his wife Bess wanted to see if they could contact Houdini’s mother, who had died in 1913. The attempt failed, and Houdini was not impressed, later telling Conan Doyle that she wasn’t convincing, and had just talked generally about ideas that were ridiculous. Houdini and Bess worked together to debunk spiritualists during the early 1920s, so it may be that they were predisposed to disbelieve Annie.
Harry Houdini
Away from her work, Annie’s family was growing. She and Frederick had had a daughter, Winifred, in early 1920, though neither she nor her older brother Jack was with them on the 1921 census. When this was taken, in June that year, the family had moved to St Stephen’s Road in Paddington. Annie’s eldest son Thomas was still at school, at the age of 16, while her younger son and daughter may have been elsewhere with family and their details not correctly recorded. Frederick, having been demobilised, was working as a photographer, but there is still no mention of Annie’s profession on this document. Annie’s sister Ellen, known as Nellie, was living with the family too, and they could still afford a domestic servant.
Nellie featured in an incident that Annie gave to the publication Light in 1922, as further proof of her powers. A photograph of their dead soldier brother had somehow come through the locked door of a room with a message on it written in chalk. Nellie and Annie had initially assumed that this was Frederick playing a trick on them, but the photograph and a new message again appeared for Nellie while Annie was away visiting Margate, and again later in Frederick’s presence. Truth got hold of the story, and wrote a somewhat cynical piece on it, but these publications dissecting her claims could not have harmed Annie’s business in the slightest.
Away from the detractors, Annie continued to work and clients were satisfied. A 1922 reading for a mother and daughter, where they attempted to contact their son/brother Frank who’d been killed in the war, was reported in Perception with and without the Imagery of Sense by G.N.M. Tyrrell. As she was coming out of her trance state, Annie perceived a large St Bernard dog sitting by the mother, growling and jealous. It turned out that this dog had died long before the daughter was born, and Annie was correct on the dog’s behaviour patterns.
Modern view of St Stephen’s Road, Paddington, where Annie lived in the 1920s and 1930s, taken from Google.
Annie and Frederick had a fourth and final child, Edward, in 1923. Over the next decade the desire to prove her as a fraud seems to have died down, probably as the distance between the mass period of loss during the First World War stretched, and the immediate grief of the populace softened. The slightly gothic Victorian notion of communicating with the dead was also ebbing away, and new ideas of psychic phenomena were coming through. Annie continued to work, and give readings, but the media of the day were less interested.
She’s known to have appeared at the Croydon Church of The Spirit in 1924 and 1926 as a clairvoyant, and similarly have appeared at the Society for Psychical Research in Sheffield in 1927. And in 1926 held a session for the secretary of Lord Northcliffe, the newspaper baron who had died in 1922, which was reported to be successful and was used as evidence in an ensuing court case.
Around 1926 she and Frederick bought a property in Banstead in Surrey, and started to live there on a regular basis while keeping up the house in Paddington so that they had a base in London. Eventually, they rented out the rooms to boarders as an extra source of income, but kept the ground floor flat for themselves. Their son Thomas became an architect, and lived with them in Surrey for a time. Their son Jack is also occasionally on electoral registers with them.
In 1928, with Conan Doyle as the president of the British College of Psychic Science, Annie was featured in their first quarterly publication of the year. The article, which also provided a photograph of her, gave various details of her childhood and early psychic experiences. As a toddler she had apparently formed an attachment to the ghost of her mother’s old school friend Cecily, and she had been particularly successful in playground games of fortune telling when she was at school.
A visit to the Sheffield branch of the Society for Psychical Research in December 1928 gives more details of her lectures. She began by telling the assembled company about mediumship and guides, and then gave a demonstration, giving messages from those who had passed beyond. The Sheffield Daily Telegraph reported “Mrs Brittain first pointed out to a lady that there was standing by her the spirit form of a man of about 60 or 65, not very tall, but with a nice face, high and wide forehead, blue eyes twinkling as though he was a happy man. His name was William, and he was trying to give her a sense of contentment. The lady replied: Yes, thank you; it was my father.”
The Sheffield Independent’s report of the event was somewhat more cynical, pointing out that only 14 of the 70 people gathered recognised the spirits that Annie said had come for them. Their report also gave more of Annie’s general views on her profession at that time: “Mrs Brittain said that mediumship and guides existed before modern spiritualism was established. She thought more care ought to be taken of mediums, for many, through fear of poverty could not devote the time they should to developing their powers… One great cry of the man in the street was that mediums were ignorant but it was unnecessary for mediums to have been educated, for it was to be remembered that Christ did not choose the educated men of his time but the lowly fishermen. She added that she thought trance-mediumship was on the decline.”
1935 saw the publication of Annie’s book, Twixt Earth and Heaven, which detailed her many experiences of psychic phenomena and how she worked and relayed them to clients. Some of the views she’d been expressing earlier would have been included and expanded upon. She felt that the main purpose of life was to build up our character so that we might cross from the body to higher progress. There is no doubt that Annie truly believed that her powers were genuine, however much scepticism others felt – a report from a gathering of the Sheffield Society for Psychical Research in 1938 urged care when accepting the pronouncement of mediums, but the same meeting had Annie along to demonstrate and contact the dead.
The 1939 register has Annie with Frederick and their son Edward, living at the Banstead house. There two of their other children are with them but their details are obscured. One is probably Jack, who was working as an architect and was shortly to marry. Annie again says that her profession was merely that of housewife – but Frederick is attributed to being an author and lecturer, which Annie was. It may be that the official that took their details decided that the wife of the partnership was far less likely to be earning, and transferred her details to her husband. Frederick does not appear to have written a book.
At some point after this, they moved to a different cottage in Banstead, probably downsizing. Frederick died in 1941, and after his death Annie appears to have stopped lecturing and travelling as there are no further newspaper references to appearances. Her son Thomas was married, her son Jack married and eventually emigrated to New Zealand with his wife and daughter. The younger two children Winifred and Edward also married, with Edward living in Australia for a while before returning home. It’s likely that Annie still did readings and sittings like before, but on a less high profile scale. She died in Surrey in the spring of 1969 after spending 18 years as a widow. She was 89.
Jane had lost not only her husband when he ran off with a barmaid, but also her own identity when her husband’s lover claimed her name on the 1851 census in a vain attempt at respectability. She later brought one of the first civil divorce cases against him, after a new act was passed in 1857 enabling women to do so for the first time.
You could be forgiven for thinking that nothing had happened between Jane and her husband Charles, since she seemingly appears alongside him and their children in West Ham in 1851. However, the actual Jane filed for divorce from Charles in 1858, and says in her paperwork that he’d left her in 1841 – which makes the woman with him in 1851 his lover Elizabeth, and not Jane at all. So Jane actually appears on that census twice – once fake, and once with information she’d given the enumerator herself.
Fovant, in Wiltshire
Jane was born in Fovant in around 1806, and had married Charles Shore in 1828 in Stockton – where she’d moved to during her childhood. Stockton lies close to the River Wylve in Wiltshire, between Warminster and Salisbury, while Fovant sits further south. Both were small rural communities. She is likely the daughter of James Goodfellow, a carpenter who died while she was still quite young, and Rhoda, nee Matthews. Her father’s death seems to have put the family – Rhoda and Jane’s siblings Hester, James, John, Mary, Elizabeth and Martha – close to the poverty line, as her mother subsequently gives her occupation as a pauper on early census returns.
Stockton, in 1910
Moving over to Stockton and subsequently marrying Charles must have seemed a bit of a step up for Jane. Charles came from Heytesbury, also relatively close by, and his father was a mason. They lived at Stockton for eight years after their marriage, while Charles worked as a farm labourer, and then moved to Trowbridge for him to run a carrying business between that town and Salisbury, and to subsequently run a pub. Much of this detail comes from Jane’s divorce petition, submitted in 1858, which fills in a great deal of the back story.
The likely pub premises, as they’re where Jane was living on the 1841 census, was the Brewery Tap on Back Street in Trowbridge, now long-since defunct, and probably serving Ushers ales, as the brewery was nearby. In all likelihood, though Charles would have been the landlord and held the licence on paper, it would probably have been Jane that did the day-to-day running of the pub. This situation was relatively common among landlords and landladies of pubs at the time.
The probable location of Jane’s pub, from the OS map taken in 1884.
The 1841 census, taken around a month after Charles deserted Jane, finds her still in the pub premises, with a new barmaid and a five-year-old girl, also called Jane though bearing Jane’s maiden surname. Jane states in her divorce petition that she’d had no children with Charles, so it’s likely that the younger Jane was a niece, the daughter of one of her many siblings, who partially fulfilled a child role in the couple. It’s relatively common to find niblings being brought up by their aunts – sometimes due to economic necessity, as that would be one less mouth for the parents to feed, but also sometimes passed over to childless couples, perhaps as a kindness in a society where motherhood was seen as a perfect state for women.
Trowbridge, around the time Jane lived there.
When the 1851 census was taken, Jane had given up the pub and had moved to Bath with her niece, where she was making a living as a nurse. This would not have been a nurse in a hospital during this era, but more someone who went into people’s houses to care for them if they were sick, or incapacitated after childbirth or an accident. It would have not been the most lucrative profession, but would have given her enough to live on. She more often worked as a monthly nurse. This was someone who cared for a woman in the final stages of pregnancy and through the birth, and lived in different households for a month at a time. She also probably did some of the chores of the household while the woman was lying in.
No photo exists of Jane, but this civil war era American nurse would have dressed very similarly to her when she was working as a nurse. Uniforms would not have been worn.
In contrast, Fake Jane, aka Elizabeth, was living with Jane’s husband Charles and two children in West Ham, where Charles was working as an engine driver on the railway. In addition to their own two children, Elizabeth had also taken in a nursechild, which meant that she’d probably lost a baby in the preceding year, but had taken in another child who needed her breastmilk. The reason for the deception of Elizabeth using Jane’s name on the official document was probably to do with respectability, as she was posing as his wife to all intents and purposes, but they perhaps feared some retribution on a legal document, as the census was. Therefore, she used the name Jane rather than Elizabeth. It’s probable that Jane never knew of this deception.
The real census entry for Jane in 1851.
The fraudulent entry for Jane in 1851.
Jane’s plea for divorce, filed on 8th November 1858, was only the second divorce case from Wiltshire under the new 1857 act, (the first was Amelia Willett, in February 1858), and was a straight plea for the marriage to end.
There was a major overhaul in divorce law in parliament in 1857. This was partly brought about by the campaigning of Caroline Norton, who (finally) received a blue plaque for her efforts in 2021. The Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 brought divorce into the civil courts, and out of the realms of the church. It also meant that for the first time women could bring divorce proceedings, or seek ways out of the legal trappings of a marriage, which is what more what Caroline Norton wanted. And this enabled Jane to seek recompense for what had happened to her.
Under the Act, which came into force on 1 January 1858, men could achieve a divorce by just proving their wife had had an affair. Women had to prove their husband’s adultery, in addition to something else he’d done wrong: either extreme cruelty, desertion, bigamy or incest. Marriages were also ended by nullity – in most cases a previous marriage which had been “forgotten” to be declared, but occasionally impotence. The Divorce and Matrimonial Court didn’t just hear the ends of marriages either – either party could apply for a judicial separation, which mean that they were still legally married, but didn’t have to live together. This was often used by women who couldn’t prove adultery but wanted to avoid flying fists. Either party could also petition the court under the act for restoration of conjugal rights, therefore forcing their partner to live with them again.
Women could also apply to protect any independent earnings they’d made since their husband’s desertion, and the first of the two earliest Wiltshire cases was one of these, filed by Amelia Willett (née Philpott) of Market Lavington in late February 1858.
Jane’s story, from the case files, was a straight plea for the marriage to end on the grounds of adultery and desertion. She says that he ran off with the bar maid Elizabeth Doughty and went to live in Vauxhall, where she passed as his wife. He hadn’t contributed anything to Jane’s upkeep since. She had discovered that they’d lived under the surname Grant, and they’d run an eating house together, but had subsequently moved to Portsmouth.
The case, which was uncontested by Charles, was sent for trial in December, and the minutes were filed in May 1859. There is no definite sign of the verdict, either in the file or the newspapers, but it’s likely that Jane could have won. She may also have run out of money to remain in London and pursue the claim – divorce could be expensive, particularly before the verdict, as the claimant would have had to have funded the proceedings themselves before any costs were awarded in judgement.
Like many people in her position, she had moved to London to be closer to the courts while the legal proceedings were heard. She lived at Bloomsbury, in lodgings on Southampton Street, while the trial was being heard, but afterwards returned to Wiltshire. The time the legal proceedings took – other divorce papers have lawyer’s lackeys sent to hunt down the defendants, to get their answers to the divorce petitions. It may be, if Charles and Elizabeth called themselves Grant, that they were unable to be found. The case was ordered by the judge to be heard via oral testimony in court in 1859, and then there is no further record.
Bloomsbury in London, from the Illustrated London News of 1850
Whatever happened, Jane returned to her previous nursing life afterwards. The 1861 census has her caring for the rector’s wife in Dunkerton, Somerset, a bit south of Bath, who had a month old baby. Ten years later, the 1871 census has her visiting a friend on Conigre in Trowbridge, round the corner from her former pub, though she was still working as a nurse.
After that she disappears from view, and probably was mis-recorded in her death record as she would most likely have been living in someone else’s house when death occurred and they would not have had her full details to bury her properly. Someone bearing her name was buried in Bishop’s Lavington, now West Lavington, in 1884, but this would appear to be someone else who had lived there for years and not the Jane we are looking for.
Charles and Elizabeth never seem to have married, however, which could also indicate that Jane’s petition failed. Elizabeth Doughty might have pretended to be Jane on the 1851 census, but used her own name afterwards. She and Charles had at least five daughters together, and moved to Portsmouth where Charles still worked as a railway engine driver. He later ran a horse drawn taxi cab around Portsmouth, but he appears to have stayed faithful to Elizabeth for the rest of his life. He died in Portsea Island in 1881.
The humble professions of Charles and Jane should hopefully help to dispel the idea that divorce in this period was a preserve of the rich. They certainly weren’t. Jane would have saved enough money from her work to afford the legal fees, while waiting for the legislation to be put in place for her divorce case to be heard. Pauper cases were also heard, although they were rarer.
Without the information given in the legal files, a very different picture of this couple could have emerged. We would have had no way of discerning what had caused the split, and could have thought Jane had gone to Vauxhall with Charles, since Elizabeth used her name. Her divorce case gives her back her truth and her history.
Margaret played a vital role in search and rescue during the Second World War, saving the lives of 21 people when she and her working dogs managed to locate them in the rubble of the doodlebug blitz. Training dogs to find buried people was an incredibly new (and incredibly dangerous) thing in the 1940s, and Margaret was at the forefront of this practice – and even was awarded a gong for bravery.
Margaret, in about 1913
Co-incidentally, a house she spent some of her early life living in later played an important part in saving people’s lives too, although long after she left. Rowden Hill House, just beneath Chippenham’s Hospital, was accommodation for nursing staff in the 1960s and 1970s, and is now in need of some tender loving care itself. Margaret lived there with her family from before 1909 until late 1913, but also lived in the USA, New Zealand and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).
She wasn’t born in Chippenham, however. She was born down the Great Western Road in Marlborough in 1889, the second of three daughters of Robert (Bob) Chaloner Critchley Long and Maud Johnson. Her father Bob, sometimes given as a gentleman and at other times given as a brewer and wine merchant, was a younger son of a Welsh MP, albeit one with a long family heritage of landowning in Wiltshire, and thus had no title and few expectations than his elder brother, but went into the army as well as running a brewing business.
Margaret’s older sister Muriel was born in Berkshire, while her younger sister Joan came along while the family were in Devon, so it sounds like the family were quite mobile. By 1901, they were in a large house, Ludford Park, in Shropshire. This was a timbered property, dating from around the early 17th century, and sat on a river bank just south of Ludlow. Here the household had ten servants, including a governess to educate Margaret and her sisters.
Two views of Ludford House in Shropshire
While Margaret’s uncle Walter became an MP like her grandfather, held seven different constituencies over 41 years and spent 16 years as a cabinet minister, her father Bob also had some political ambitions. To that end, he bought Rowden Hill House in Chippenham at some point before 1909, and campaigned to be the Conservative and Unionist Party MP for West Wiltshire (at that time you did not need to live in your constituency) for the first 1910 general election, held in January.
This meant that Margaret and her sister Joan moved into Rowden Hill House (elder sister Muriel had married a few years earlier), and became involved in campaigning for their father’s victory. In Margaret’s case, that meant becoming part of the local branch of the Women’s Unionist and Tariff Reform Association.
Rowden Hill House in Chippenham, now in a state of disrepair
This group, from the days before women could vote, were a way some women could get involved in politics and have an influence on the way men voted. The Tariff Reform League, of which they were an offshoot, formed in 1903, was effectively a pressure group promoting British empire industry and products over those imported from elsewhere. The Unionist part of their name meant that they opposed home rule in Ireland. These values were extremely popular and aligned with the Conservative party, who at the time were known as the Conservative and Unionist party. One of the key tenets of the Women’s Unionist and Tariff Reform Association was that women’s engagement in political life was vital, both as citizens and as consumers of goods. This was part of a wider evolving of thought which was part of the process of women gaining a vote.
Despite Margaret’s involvement, her father did not win the West Wiltshire seat in January 1910, and did not stand again in the subsequent general election in December 1910, which was called to attempt to pass a mandate.
The family stayed at Rowden Hill House despite the end of her father’s political career, though it appears that he and his wife moved around in subsequent years. Margaret, aged 22, and her sister Joan were living at Rowden Hill on the 1911 census, with a houseful of servants. Neither of them has any profession given, and their parents aren’t at home.
From a 1900 advert offering the property to let, the house at that time had four reception rooms, servants’ accommodation, thirteen bed and dressing rooms, stables, a coach house, a gardener’s cottage and even two orchards.
This would seem slightly excessive for a family of four at the time, but a large house would have projected their monied status within the community, and room for entertaining and house parties was an essential part of life for people who moved in their circles.
An announcement of Margaret’s impending marriage was made in the society papers in March 1911 when she was 22. Her intended was Andrew Reynold Uvedale Corbett, of Crabwell Hall in Cheshire.
For whatever reason, this marriage did not take place. Andrew never married, and instead became an antique dealer in Hampshire. The end of the engagement got a quiet mention in The Gentlewoman in March 1912.
Margaret’s family remained at Rowden Hill until late 1913, when Robert and Maud moved them to Northcliffe House, just outside Bradford on Avon. It was from this house that Margaret actually did get married, in January 1914. Her new husband was Jack Giffard, a member of a prestigious family from Lockeridge, near Marlborough.
Margaret at the time of her wedding announcement in 1914
Jack was serving with the Royal Horse Artillery at the time, and as such might have expected to see action when the First World War began later that year. He was promoted to Captain that October, and does appear to have been involved in the early part of the conflict, even winning the Légion d’Honneur, as part of the British Expeditionary Force – but after his twin brother was killed in action in the first autumn of the war he seems to have stepped back a little from active duty.
Instead, he was specially employed by the war office from 1915. Margaret had their first daughter, Violet, in 1915, when they were living at Long Ashton just south of Bristol. She was pregnant with their next daughter – Sybelle – when Jack was sent to the USA on war business of the Anglo-Russian sub-committee in the Autumn of 1915, without her. Sybelle entered the world in Charlton in Kent in April 1916, presumably close to where Jack had been garrisoned before he left the country. She was then baptised near Marlborough, as Margaret had presumably brought her daughters back to Jack’s family in Wiltshire for support caring for them while her husband was away.
In June 1916, around two months after giving birth to Sybelle, Margaret arrived in New York to reunite with Jack. Neither baby Sybelle nor toddler Violet went with her, so they were cared for elsewhere. She spent two years in New York with Jack, and they arrived back after the war was over, in December 1918, with a third baby – Jacqueline – in tow.
Her mother died near Melksham in the early months of 1919, which may have been the reason Margaret and Jack hastened back to England. Later that year, Margaret and Jack purchased Shurnhold House at Melksham, perhaps intending it to be their family home.
In reality though, it appears Jack spent very little time there as he’s given as going back and forth to New York on ships over the next couple of years, and by the time the 1921 census was taken Margaret and Jack’s daughters were at the house being cared for by staff while Jack was on war business in London. Margaret was also not at home on the 1921 census, as she was visiting her younger sister Joan in Westminster. Joan had been married and divorced by this time, and was working as a dressmaker’s model.
After this, Margaret and the children (and Jack, when he was in the country), lived first in Amersham in Buckinghamshire, and then in Putney. Another daughter, Eleanor, joined them in 1923, and they rented out Shurnhold House.
It’s while they were in Putney that a glimpse of Margaret’s life to come starts to shine through. There’s a newspaper reference to a Mrs Giffard being involved in demonstrating the skills of working dogs, alongside a police dogs demonstration, in January of 1924 at Crystal Palace. The article radiates some excitement at the potential for the use of working dogs, since this was a particularly new idea anywhere other than the North East transport police forces who had been using dogs since around 1906. She was also an honorary secretary of the Alsatian Sheep, Police and Army Dog Society around this time.
However, there’s no further mention of her connected with dog training after this, and Jack seems to have decided to become a farmer in the newly formed British colony of Southern Rhodesia, so left for Africa in September 1925. Margaret’s father appears to have gone out there slightly earlier, so the plan may have been for the rest of the family to come and join him and become prosperous out there. At some point after that Margaret and her daughters followed him, and both her sisters ended up there too. Jack went back and forth between various African ports and England several times over the next few years, but Margaret never seemed to be with him.
Mrs Giffard has one last mention at a Catholic wedding in Harare in 1927, where her two younger daughters were bridesmaids, and then there is no more mention of Margaret under that name.
Two of Margaret’s daughters as bridesmaids in Rhodesia in 1927
Jack remarried in Penhalonga, Southern Rhodesia, in 1933, so their relationship had come to an end. Her father died in 1938, in Wraxall, Southern Rhodesia, and – alongside leaving his housekeeper £200 for looking after his grandchildren – his will refers to Margaret as Margaret Bruce Griffin, so it appears that she had remarried too.
This marriage took place in New Zealand in 1930, to Harold Desmond Griffin. They returned to Britain in 1935 and settled in Sussex, where Harold worked as a farm manager and Margaret started her own boarding kennels. This marriage does not appear to have lasted either, as by the beginning of the Second World War Margaret was in Surrey, living on her own. She kept goats and poultry, and was training dogs for both war and the police.
Margaret was, by this stage, a renowned breeder and trainer of German Shepherd dogs, or Alsatians as they were known at the time. She attended various dog shows with her charges, and was becoming well known for the breed. German Shepherds had been favoured as police and working dogs since the Hull force – the first in the country to employ dogs – had decided to use them in 1923. Forces elsewhere in the country gradually became interested, and the Home Office had set up a committee to evaluated the use of dogs in policing in 1934, with a couple of labradors added to the Metropolitan force in 1935.
There were two schools training dogs for war work. The Army’s War Dogs Training School was initially based at Aldershot, then at Ickenham and then in Hertfordshire. It started with just a few dogs but by 1944 had capacity for 750 canines. Margaret became part of the staff at the other school, the Ministry of Aircraft Production Guard Dog School (MAPGDS), which was based at Woodfold near Gloucester. This school had been founded in November 1941 by Lieutenant Colonel Baldwin, and started with just 15 dogs. Two years later there were 665 dogs either training or working at Ministry of Aircraft Production sites throughout the UK. The MAPGDS was absorbed into the RAF Police and retitled the RAF Police Dog Training School in 1944.
While working with training police dogs was important in terms of developing that relationship and the skills involved in policing, Margaret and a couple of other trainers actually played a far more important part in war work. She was involved in the instigation of training and using dogs to locate and find people needing rescuing from disasters – bombs, gas explosions and building collapses. The concept of Search and Rescue Dogs was an entirely new idea at the time.
The dogs used for rescuing, however, while trained at these schools, weren’t those used by the military or police but instead tended to be the personal dogs of these trainers.
The story of how dogs came to be used for rescuing trapped people from under rubble is rumoured to have come from Colonel Baldwin having watched The Siege of Stalingrad at Cheltenham cinema which gave rise to the idea that dogs – with their enhanced sense of smell – could be trained to locate buried casualties. Indeed, the first documented rescue of an avalanche victim located by an untrained dog occurred in 1937. Margaret lit on the idea and started working on it with dogs from her kennels, and recalled a couple of dogs that had previously been through the MAP school to see if they could be retrained. One dog she retrieved from New Zealand.
They began working on commands and tells, and eventually gave a demonstration to the Minister of Home Security where volunteers hid themselves on bombed sites amid burning rags. The dogs had located their targets within two minutes. The first dog to go into service was Jet, who had been trained by Margaret. The dog started working on a site that had been bombed by a V-1 attack in north London in October 1944, and was distracted by onlookers, but soon after that located three deceased casualties after another attack at Purley.
After this, Margaret formed a team with two of her dogs – Irma and Psyche – from her renowned Crumstone Kennel, and worked alongside rescue teams throughout the doodlebug blitz, where V-1 flying bombs fell on London, to locate casualties buried under collapsed buildings. Between them, Margaret and her dogs managed to locate 233 victims in the rubble, 21 of whom were still alive. They also located buried pets alongside the humans.
Crumstone Irma, one of Margaret’s top dogs
Irma was particularly good at locating. She would change the sound of her bark when she felt that a victim was still alive, and would often not leave the site until the casualty was found. On one occasion it took two days to unearth two girls, and Irma refused to leave. Another tell from the dogs that indicated that someone was to be found was for Psyche and Irma’s ears to suddenly lie flat on their neck, and they would also excitedly scratch at the remains of the houses if they believed someone was alive.
Margaret, who attended the sites with the dogs in a blue-serge civil defence great coat and a beret with a German Shepherd badge on it, would also put her own safety at risk while working with her team to rescue people. She appears to have been incredibly brave and stoical about the work in hand. Extracts from her diary, which is believed to be held by the Dogs’ Trust, read:
11 and 12.11.1944. Rocket at Shooter’s Hill. 20.05 hrs. Public House, Ambulance Depot and 2 offices. Put Irma on right away. Frightful mess. Most of the casualties known to be in bar and billiard room of Pub but a few “unknowns” had to be located. Irma gave strong indication to right of debris… Digging proceeded here and after 2 hours the bodies of 2 women were recovered in the exact position, under approximately 7 feet of debris below the dog’s indication.”
21.11.1944 – Rocket on Walthamstowe (sic), 12.30 hrs. Arrived on site 13.30 hrs. Four houses completely demolished, about twelve badly knocked about. Things were made no easier by water pipes burst in all directions and a bad gas leak under the debris. A smashed meter was pouring gas into the rubble. Worked Irma. In spite of the stench of gas, she indicated at a point at the back of the debris. From the front of the building, she and I went right under the floors crawling on our stomachs in water. She lay down here when we reached a point approximately dead below the spot where she had indicated. Below this the bodies of a woman and two children were buried 4ft under fine rubble and dust.
20.1.1945 – Call to Osborne Road, Tottenham at 21:00 hrs. In house No.1 Irma found two live casualties. In No.2 Irma again gave good indication just to one side of a fairly large and fierce fire burning through collapsed house debris. Thick smoke rising here. Family of five found. In No.3 a strong indication from Irma over the debris. Rescue found a live cat.
Margaret and her dogs working
Once the war came to an end in the spring of 1945, the direct services of Psyche and Irma, and therefore Margaret, were no longer needed with such urgency. However, their courage and wartime roles did not go unrewarded. Irma had been awarded the Dicken Medal (a bravery award for working animals during wartime) in January of 1945, and she and Margaret took part in the victory celebrations on Pall Mall in June 1946, alongside the first rescue dog Jet. They were the only two dogs to take part.
Margaret herself received the British Empire Medal in the 1946 New Year Honours, for her work training and working alongside the dogs.
Away from her war work, both her sisters had died in Harare (then known as Salisbury) during the war – Joan in 1941 and Muriel in 1943. The rest of the family also seem to have continued living in either Southern Rhodesia or South Africa. Margaret’s eldest daughter Violet, had married, then divorced, a wildlife expert. She then married again. Her third daughter Jacqueline married in India during the war, and eventually moved to Australia. And fourth daughter Eleanor became a nun in South Africa. However, there is no indication whether Margaret ever went back to Southern Rhodesia to see them. Her ex-husband Jack died in 1956, also in Southern Rhodesia.
Once the war was over, Margaret and her dogs returned to the dog school at Gloucester, where Irma and Psyche demonstrated their skills alongside another dog called Storm, who was also from Margaret’s Crumstone kennel and had appeared on screen in Owd Bob (1938). The trainers, including Margaret, also began to investigate teaching their dogs to search for victims in terrains other than rubble. Lieutenant Colonel Baldwin arranged for three of the dogs to search a mine in Cumbria after an explosion in 1947. The groundwork put in by Margaret and other trainers during the war built the foundations for modern search and rescue operations.
Later on, Margaret is known to have exhibited dogs from her Crumstone kennel at Crufts Dog Show. There are pictures of her with Irma and Psyche meeting children that she had rescued from rubble in 1945, at Crufts in 1950. Eventually Irma died, and was buried at the PDSA Animal Cemetery in Ilford.
Margaret meets children she saved, c1950
As for Margaret, after 1950 she mostly disappears from public view. She continued to breed German Shepherds and train them when necessary for different purposes, and would also have continued to attend Crufts. She is known to have been based at Wallingford in Oxfordshire in the early 1950s, and have lived alone. The 1961 Crufts Catalogue has her entering German Shepherds in several categories, and advertising her small Crumstone kennel at Goring-on-Thames in the same pages, listing many winners in the UK and on the international stage. Her dog Crumstone Strolch had won many prizes and had starred in the films Circus Friends (1956), Ill Met By Moonlight (1957) and Norman Wisdom’s Follow a Star (1959). This probably meant that Margaret would have attended film sets with her dogs while they appeared on camera.
She died in Henley on Thames, in May 1972, aged 83. Her death went unremarked upon in the newspapers. In a case of life following art, the house where she spent some of her formative years – Rowden Hill House in Chippenham – is now in disrepair and used for the training of police dogs.
One of the best known and loved volunteers at the Chippenham Red Cross hospital during the First World War wasn’t a nurse. Ethel Williams was the hospital’s head cook, a role she shared with Minnie Shipp, and is remembered fondly in the surviving documents from the hospital.
Ethel’s actual first name was Gertrude – a relatively popular girls’ name in the 1870s, when she was born – but by the time she was 12 she was known to everyone as Ethel.
Ethel, in her VAD uniform
She was born in Chippenham, to an ex-soldier turned landlord and a mother who was particularly good at running pubs. She had a half-brother and half-sister from her mother’s first marriage, and at the age of five gained another sister – Elsie.
When she was small, the family lived at the Bear Hotel, but her parents gave that up and moved to St Mary Street. When she was 9 her father died, and her mother went back into the pub trade – running several establishments in the town with the help of her children and step-children. Ethel would have grown up helping out in her mother’s pubs – she had at least two at one point – and serving customers.
Aged 21, in 1900, she married a vet – George Williams – who was ten years her senior. She was living in Chippenham’s market place, while he was resident up near St Paul’s Church. The 1901 census finds them together, at the rather innocuously named 2 Langley Road. In fact, 2 Langley Road was The Clift House, a rather grand property with grounds and a fountain in the garden, which was finally demolished in the early 1980s and replaced with sheltered accommodation flats for the elderly.
Former Clift House on Langley Road in Chippenham, taken in 1906, while Ethel lived there
They had two daughters, Margery in 1901 and Caryl in 1905. In 1908 Ethel gave birth to her third child, a son, who sadly did not survive. This boy was not given a name. Their household appears comfortable, with a sizeable property and several domestic servants to help with the chores.
When the First World War hit, in August 1914, Ethel’s daughters were 13 and 9 and at school, and the shortage of male workers meant that women were encouraged to work and volunteer outside the home. While many women took roles making munitions at places like Saxby and Farmer (later Westinghouse), going out to work wasn’t quite right for women of Ethel’s social standing. Instead, they volunteered with the Red Cross. Ethel was part of the committee who worked to provide Belgian refugees arriving in Chippenham in 1914 with food and accommodation. They had escaped the early horrors of the war during that autumn, and were housed in various places in Britain, supported by the local Red Cross.
The next big Red Cross project locally was the hospital that was set up at Chippenham’s Town Hall in 1915. Ethel was engaged here from the outset, alongside other women of her social standing – for example, one daughters of the Clutterbuck family from Hardenhuish House also served, as did the daughter of Lady Coventry of Monkton Park, many of the wives of prominent town businessmen, and even the wife of Ivy Lane School’s headteacher.
The Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) provided nursing care for the wounded from the war, and were an important part of the war effort at home. Chippenham’s Town Hall initially had 40 beds, and received its first patients in early November 1915. Demand became higher, and the hospital expanded to include the Neeld Hall and the Corn Exchange, and by November 1916 there were 100 beds available.
Volunteer staff at Chippenham temporary hospital
Many of the VADs were nurses to the wounded, and – given Ethel’s sister Elsie was at this point nursing in London – it might be expected that Ethel took this role too. However, there were lots of other volunteer jobs needed in the hospital, such as cleaning the wards, attending in the mess room, and washing up.
Ethel became the hospital’s head cook, which she shared alongside Mrs Minnie Shipp from Foxham. Other women also cooked, and she had several volunteers helped prepare vegetables, but Ethel and Minnie were in charge. This meant that they served both patients and staff.
Minnie, who was born Minnie Hatton and originally came from the Bournemouth area, was the wife of a farmer and butcher in Foxham. She came from a food background – her father was a baker, alongside her husband being a butcher – so would seem to have been an obvious choice for the shared role of head cook.
Minnie Shipp, as a VAD
She and her husband Edgar had four children, three girls and a boy. Their son, Frederick, was old enough to serve during the war, so was sent away to the front while Minnie’s daughters stayed at home. They seem to have been a fairly wealthy family. Before setting up as a farmer in Foxham, her husband Edgar ran a butcher’s shop in Bath’s Northgate Street, and the family had several servants – including a “mother’s help” for Minnie. In addition to Minnie volunteering at the hospital during the war, two of her daughters joined her.
Records show that Ethel volunteered for many hours in alternate weeks during her time at the VAD hospital. Presumably, the weeks that Ethel didn’t work were the ones where Minnie was in charge. It’s Ethel’s food at the hospital that is well remembered, however, although Minnie’s fare was probably equally as good, perhaps because she remained in the town after the war where Minnie did not.
Ethel’s cookbook contains recipes for macaroons, nut loaf, pancakes, dried apricot jam and others to the delight of the recovering soldiers. Alongside her duties as a cook she was also in charge of entertainment, arranging visits to local homes and days out for the patients. One of her favourite activities was taking the men for picnics, especially to Cherhill (near Calne).
One picnic in particular would stay with Ethel forever. On 12th July 1918, whilst picnicking with the soldiers, nurse and their families, a Royal Flying Corps (RFC) plane crashed in a nearby field. Piloted by Captain Douglas Ridley Clunes Gabell, the plane was described as an R.E.8 C2236 (140 R et F or RAF WD/21146). He was only 20. Lieutenant George Frederick Delmar-Williamson (aged 19), of Black Watch Regiment, was the passenger on board. The aeroplane was a new machine, and it caught fire after it fell. The accident report recorded ‘both pilot and passenger died of fractured skulls’. The Court of Enquiry said the accident was caused ‘due to the wings collapsing in the air’. This incident affected Ethel greatly and she wrote to the father of Lieutenant Delmar-Williamson in Cheltenham to pass on her condolences.
Ethel served at the hospital until it closed in September 1917, and stayed with the Red Cross after the war ended. She was much loved by the patients, and one (Pte J. C. Dempsey) even wrote a poem about her. She was awarded a certificate of honourable service after the war.
After the war, Ethel returned to life as the vet’s wife, but still volunteered with the Red Cross. Her mother died in 1921, and her half-brother Joe Buckle ran a popular shop on Chippenham’s High Street.
By 1939 George had retired, and they’d left Clift House for a newer house on Malmesbury Road. Ethel was still in the Red Cross reserves during the Second World War. One of their daughters married, but the younger one still lived at home.
George died just after the end of the war, but left Ethel and other relatives a considerable amount of money.
Fellow cook Minnie did not stay in Chippenham. She and husband Edgar had moved to Dorset by the early 1930s, where one of her daughters ran a hotel. They were in West Parley by 1939. Edgar died in 1941, while Minnie lived on until 1946. When she died she left over £14,000.
Ethel lived on at Chippenham’s Malmesbury Road as a widow until the mid-1960s, when she died aged 87 leaving money to a solicitor.
She’s buried at St Paul’s church in Malmesbury Road, next to where her house once stood.
A book, Unity and Loyalty: The Story of Chippenham’s Red Cross Hospital, by Ray Adler, explores the full story of the town’s VADs. It is available at Chippenham museum and the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre.
One of the ways a gently-born Victorian woman who’d fallen on hard times could make an income respectably was to teach creative skills. In a society where women were expected to be decorative and provide entertainment, there was always a demand for those skills – from peers and for those who aspired to climb the social ladder.
That’s the route Charlotte took when her merchant husband returned to India without her, leaving her to bring up her small son alone. She claimed widowhood, taught piano and singing in fashionable circles, and gave recitals – in London, Chippenham, and Bristol. Except the qualifications she traded upon were actually later proved to be fake. And there is a question mark over whether she actually married her husband at all.
She was the daughter of Edward Peagam, a lawyer who occasionally called himself a gentleman, and his wife Mary. She was their eldest child, born about five years after they married (in London in 1846, with Edward calling himself a gentleman), in Sandbach in Cheshire – a pretty market town to the north-east of Crewe.
However respectable and middle class her background was, it does not appear to have been financially stable. Her father spent as much time becoming bankrupt as he did defending those with debt issues, and his name was often splashed all over the newspapers as owing money to creditors.
It was during one of those periods of bankruptcy that Charlotte was removed from the family home, and sent to Devon to be brought up by her grandmother and aunt Ann.
Her widowed grandmother, Mary Peagam, had been making a living as a hosier – someone who made legwear, so socks and stockings – but had acquired enough of a cushion to live off if wisely invested. Ann was her eldest unmarried daughter. Together they brought up Charlotte in Plymouth, and even when her parents’ financial situation was more stable she wasn’t returned to them.
By 1861 Charlotte’s parents had moved to Bicester in Oxfordshire, where her father was working as a solicitor. They had had two further daughters – Julia and Laura – so Charlotte had younger sisters, but she did not grow up alongside them.
At some point in the 1860s Charlotte’s mother had had enough of the constant financial fluctuations, and left her father. She returned to the Plymouth area with her two younger daughters, and they lived apart thereafter, and she may have seen Charlotte more regularly.
After her grandmother’s death in 1864, Charlotte’s aunt Ann moved into the supporting role for her. They boarded in Plymouth with another family, living off the interest of money, and at some point before 1879 moved to London.
Somewhere around this point, Charlotte met Cowasjee Wookerjee or Wookergee. He gave himself in trade directories as an East India Company merchant, but since that company had ceased to operate by 1874 it is likely that he was using the name and trading by association.
He had some sort of merchant business, importing products from India – possibly textiles – which was based in Leadenhall Market in the City of London. This was likely appealing to exclusive clients. However, since he was only there in the 1880 trade directory, he probably wasn’t there for long.
Leadenhall Market in London, where Cowasjee Wookerjee had a business in 1880
There’s no marriage record for Charlotte and Cowasjee in the British Isles, but it’s always possible that they did marry elsewhere. They certainly regarded themselves as married. Their first son, Pheeroze, was born in Paddington in 1879. They had a second son, Khoosow, in London in the summer of 1880, but later on that year Pheeroze died at just over a year old. The family do not appear on the 1881 census, taken that April, possibly due to poor transcription, but if they were in the country they were most likely in London.
There is a slim possibility that Charlotte had travelled to India with Mr Cowasjee Wookerjee and Khoosow, however. An article from an Indian newspaper in June 1881 says that he had selected and brought out machinery from Europe to start Scindia’s Paper Mill.
This, probably established by the Scindia family in modern-day Madhya Pradesh, made paper from rags and karbi (exactly what that was isn’t clear).
The article said:
“Great praise is due to Mr Wookerjee for the untiring zeal and energy he has show in connection with this scheme from which considerable results may be expected. The mill, indeed, promises to be a great success, especially as skilled European engineers and workmen have been employed to carry on the work.”
Whether or not Charlotte and Khoosow went to India, Charlotte’s marriage fell apart and they separated. She gave herself as a widow, but there’s another mention of Cowasjee Wookerjee in the Indian press in 1896, so that probably wasn’t the truth. She and her son were definitely in the UK by 1885, as the first evidence of Charlotte’s new career is reported upon then.
Giving herself as Mrs Cowasjee Wookerjee, Charlotte is reported as having sung at a Cricket Club concert in Monks Risborough, Buckinghamshire. This means that she and Khoosow were probably living nearby.
By February 1886 though, Charlotte had moved to Ealing and was starting to become more established as a teacher of music. She also had a stage name, Madame Elcho, which she used for performing and teaching purposes.
Her main qualification for teaching – she called herself a professor of music – was as a Fellow of the Society of Science, Letters and Art.
This society, which allowed Charlotte to put the letters F.S.Sc. after her name, was run by Dr Edward Albert Sturman from his house in Kensington. It allowed its members to wear academic dress and take exams that were not even marked, resulting in bought diplomas. Charlotte was thus duped, and traded on these qualifications for many years. The society was eventual exposed as bogus in 1892.
After only a couple of years in Ealing, she moved to Southall, where she further promoted herself as Madame Elcho and taught piano, organ, singing and music theory. She also performed once a week at Mr Adler’s Music Repository, in Uxbridge. George Louis Adler was a pianist, music dealer and composer, and used to run entertainments from his shop on St Andrew’s. Charlotte would have been part of a community of musicians and performers who worked out of here, and this would have enabled her to bring in new pupils.
After a year or two in Southall, Charlotte decided to move again. She chose Chippenham in Wiltshire for her new base, and set up home with her son Khoosow, who was then around 9. Her aunt Ann still lived with them, and would have helped her out with childcare and house duties.
In Chippenham she seems to have dispensed with the Madame Elcho name, and instead traded as Mrs Cowasjee Wookergee – a name that might have sounded quite exotic to the locals. She was initially based in Patterdown, from where she briefly advertised herself as a piano and artistic singing teacher, and said that she could travel to Corsham and Melksham for lessons. After that she moved to a house on Cook Street called East View, in the historic part of the town. Cook Street is now part of Chippenham’s St Mary Street, and is part of a particularly beautiful stretch of houses off the town’s market place.
From here she and Khoosow and her aunt Ann appear on the 1891 census together, on which Charlotte gave herself as a professor of music, and Khoosow would probably have attended the local elementary school by the church.
She had days of the week when she would teach in Trowbridge and Melksham, but seems to have been mostly based teaching Chippenham citizens to sing and play the piano. She also gave regular public performances. There is a report from 1890 of her singing as part of a concert at the Congregational Church, alongside other local performers. She also ran a series of piano concerts in the town hall, and tutored a choir of children to perform too.
When advertising her teaching services, Charlotte would occasionally submit testimonials to tempt potential pupils.
According to her, Musical World said of her: “In all she does a true and artistic feeling is made manifest.” Similarly, The Era apparently said that she had “grace and elegance” in her method. And the Court Circular said: “Can sing from D on the bass staff to B flat above the treble line, and she has been well trained in the Italian School of Art. Three recalls at the end of the evening rewarded her efforts to please.”
She was in Chippenham until at least 1892, but by 1895 her services are being advertised from Keynsham, to the west of Bath. Here she was directing concerts, and also performing throughout the 1890s at the Hamilton Rooms, which were on Bristol’s Park Street. There are also newspaper reports of concerts in Bristol’s Staple Hill, and one where she and others were entertaining inmates of Bristol’s workhouse infirmary.
It’s therefore no surprise to find her living in Bristol on the 1901 census. She and her son Khoosow and aunt Ann had set up home in Cumberland Street, in the city’s St Paul’s district. This would have been a relatively fashionable address for the time, even if the houses were in multiple occupation. Charlotte continued to give herself as a professor of music, while Khoosow, now aged 20, was a clerk at the post office. Ann still had no profession given, but would have been occupied with home duties.
After this point, Charlotte seems to have been starting to live a quieter life. There are no reports of concerts in the press, but she probably still taught.
Khoosow married in 1907, and went to live in the St Philips area of Bristol, where he worked as a packer for a printer. His wedding certificate gave his father as Cowasgee Wookergee, a general merchant. He and his wife Laura had several children who grew into quite a dynasty.
The following year, Charlotte’s aunt Ann died. She was quite elderly, and it’s likely that Charlotte may have had to do some considerable nursing in her twilight years. In 1909 Charlotte’s father died at Lutterworth. His financial situation does not appear to have settled entirely – he’d operated out of Southampton, Torquay, north Wales, and Rugby. His death was remarked upon in the press, and it sounds like he was well respected despite his monetary failings.
Charlotte herself is illusive on the 1911 census, but we know from an advert in the newspapers of that year that she had moved to Frampton Cotterell, in South Gloucestershire. She appears to have run some sort of market garden, offering baskets of produce for delivery. This is considerably different from teaching music, and perhaps reflects a more settled way of life.
Charlotte died in 1914, not long after the outbreak of the First World War. She was 62 and still living in Frampton Cotterell, though she was buried at a church in nearby Coalpit Heath.
Escaping the Russian Revolution by the skin of her teeth may have been a defining event for Eugenie, but she also lived a truly international life that was shaped by the twists and turns of the 20th century. Add in several love affairs (at least one of which that went wrong), a search for various missing family members, the ability to speak and conduct business in several languages, and a knack of always falling on her feet, and you have a woman able to call many places home.
Eugenie was born at the tail end of the 19th century in Naples, one of four known children of an Italian/Polish couple. However, she identified as Russian. Her father was the harbour master of the Black Sea port of Odessa, now in modern Ukraine but at that time emphatically part of the Russian Empire, and the family were based there for her whole childhood and beyond.
The harbour at Odessa during Eugenie’s childhood
Odessa, at that time, had a sizeable population that was historically Italian, even if by this stage they identified as Russian. Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, had founded the city with a large number of Italian immigrants in 1794, having taken the area from the Ottoman Empire, and their descendants and relatives had remained. At this time, nationality and loyalties were often taken historically in the eyes of the authorities, and groups of people with similar backgrounds were lumped together.
Odessa was also, in addition to being an important port, quite cosmopolitan. As well as the historical Italian-descended population, there were Swiss, Greeks, and about a third of the population of the city in Eugenie’s time was Jewish. There were cafes, coffee shops, bakeries, merchants and artisans throughout the city, which at this time was the 4th largest city in the Russian Empire. Jews, while Eugenie was small at least, had fewer restrictions and discrimination in Odessa than elsewhere in Russia, leading to a vibrant city in which to grow up.
As the daughter of the harbour master, Eugenie and her family would have lived close to the busy port and could see boats and cargo arriving and departing every day. Her father’s job was probably relatively well paid, meaning they could experience some of the culture around them, but they would not have been in the higher or richer echelons of local society.
Events and strains in wider Russia did reach Odessa, however. When Eugenie was around nine, in 1905, a pogrom against the Jewish population took place in the city. Over 400 Jews were killed, and many more injured. Although it was unlikely Eugenie was directly involved in these events, as she was a child, this would have dramatically altered the atmosphere of the city.
Eugenie, second from left, in Odessa during her youth
In her early adulthood, she worked in Odessa as a school teacher. She spoke Russian, French, English, and some Polish and Italian. She could play the piano, so must have been taught in childhood, and was known as an expert seamstress. Religiously, she was a devout Russian Orthodox believer, and kept their festivals.
The Russian Revolution, which began in 1917, was the next big event to affect Odessa – and also changed life completely for Eugenie. Although the unrest had started in February 1917, and continued in the October of that year, but reached Odessa in mid-January 1918, when Eugenie was around 22.
The city’s revolutionary committees were elected on 17th and 18th January, and the uprising began in earnest on the 27th. For Eugenie and her family, whose sympathies were with the empire (indeed, her older brother Paolo was even in the Tsarist army), this meant they had to leave and fast. Battleships arrived in her father’s port, and the family fled. Eugenie remembered being pulled aboard a leaving ship by a sailor, and in the resulting confusion she completely lost her family.
Bolsheviks entering Odessa, during the revolution
The climate for Jews and citizens not of Russian origin changed in Odessa as a result of the revolution, so returning was not an option. In the aftermath, she found herself in Baghdad, at that point in Mesopotamia but modernly the capital of Iraq. The area had been part of the Ottoman Empire until the year before, but had been put under British rule as the British Mandate of Mesopotamia. Here Eugenie met and married another misplaced Russian, whose first name has been lost to history. His surname, Filaratoff, indicates that he was probably Russian-born, and was likely also misplaced due to the Revolution. Baghdad, at this time, had a large Jewish community – Jews made up a quarter to a third of the city’s population – and others with the surname Filaratoff have followed the Jewish faith, so this could be an indication of his background, but his religion was never discussed in later life. After the unrest of the flight from Odessa, this may have seemed like a safe haven for Eugenie and her new husband.
There was a revolt against British rule in 1920, but this was supressed. Not long afterwards, Eugenie’s first child – a son, Volek – was born in Baghdad.
Revolution in Baghdad in 1920
Sadly, Eugenie’s marriage was marked by domestic violence, and did not last. She took infant Volek and left, forming another relationship with a British man, George. Volek’s father later found his way to Palestine, and died there during the second world war.
George was a British engineer likely in Mesopotamia as part of either the British forces, or as someone who had served in the country during the First World War and had decided to come back and settle. He worked in communications, linking up desert areas. Their daughter Diana was born in 1924.
Baghdad in the 1920s
George died of natural causes, while undertaking his work in the desert. His spinster sisters in the UK asked to take care of Diana, but Eugenie refused and instead brought up Volek and Diana alone for a time.
Eventually Eugenie got together with the widower of her friend Xenia. Xenia, someone else of Russian background, had died after childbirth in 1922, leaving her husband Thomas to care for their newborn son Peter. Therefore, Peter became part of the family alongside Volek and Diana, and Thomas and Eugenie brought their family up close to Baghdad.
Thomas ran a dairy and farming business in the Baghdad area. He had come from a farming background in Worcestershire, and had been posted to Mesopotamia during the First World War. After the war, he had discovered that his first wife had possibly had another relationship while he was away, so returned to the Middle East to make a new life for himself. It was there in Baghdad that he had met and married Xenia, Eugenie’s friend. Given his background, dairy farming would have been an obvious choice for a business to begin with. They supplied the British Forces with dairy products, alongside anyone else local who wanted them.
His first farm was in Alwiya, just outside Baghdad. There he kept horses alongside his dairy cattle. Eugenie had visited him there, while he was married to Xenia, and had initially thought of him as rude and angry, as he’d walked past her and ignored her while she was there as a guest. Later, after they had got together, she lived with him at this farm, and assisted him in the business.
Eugenie and Thomas with Diana and Volek, and a farm hand, on the farm at Alwiya
Iraq achieved independence from British rule in 1932, but Eugenie and Thomas decided to stay put. Despite him being married to Xenia in the Presbyterian Church in Baghdad, and officially a widower, they did not marry straight away. Under British law, the marriage between Thomas and his previous wife could have been dissolved. Either party could have proved adultery. However, this did not happen. This may have been a refusal to accept the societal stigma of divorce on her part, or a complication with Thomas not being resident in the UK.
In Iraq, Eugenie had friends in a wider Russian community, and kept the Orthodox festivals – like Easter – with them. She would bake for the occasion, cooking different large cakes, beautiful pastries and tarts. Her son John says: “Every year she would buy different multi coloured cheap floral material pieces and use these to sew onto raw eggs very carefully and tightly. She would take hours doing this and when completed hard boil the eggs. When dry, remove the material and the dye from the coloured patterns were imprinted on each egg beautifully. All these lovely looking eggs were displayed in a large bowl and looked so attractive. On Easter Sunday, Eugenie would invite all her Russian friends to a party to celebrate the occasion. Each visitor would take an egg and crack it against another visitor’s egg, saying in Russian “Christ has Risen” and eat the egg.”
Eugenie had two more children with Thomas, George and Gladys, who didn’t live. Family tales say they both died of tuberculosis. Then her final child, son John, arrived in 1934. Later on, they moved to a second farm, just outside Fallujah, between Baghdad and RAF Habbaniya (a British military base, built in the 1930s), close to the River Euphrates.
Peter, and later Volek, were sent to Worcestershire to be looked after by Thomas’s sister, and educated in a British school, at some point in the 1930s, but Diana and John stayed with their parents. Their lives included trips to the cinema, and to hotels for dinner twice a week. Eugenie also had fur coats – a mark of wealth at that time, when the ethics of creating those garments were not called into question. At one point their house had five members of staff.
They held card playing parties for government ministers, and moved in exclusive circles. They were members of the Alwiyah Club, an exclusive institution which had opened in 1921. This had regular social events, a ballroom, swimming pool, and tennis courts. Baghdad had various clubs at the time, one for each established profession, plus those for different religions represented in the city. The Alwiyah was the most exclusive, and was known for having prominent citizens in its ranks.
A modern view inside the Alwiyah Club
Then, out of the blue, in 1937 Eugenie discovered that her family had survived the Russian Revolution, and had settled in Naples. She took her son John with her, and went to reunite with them. Her father had passed on, and one of her sisters had married and was living in France, but she was able to reconnect with her mother, other sister and brother.
Eugenie with her son John, reconnecting with family in Naples
Eugenie with daughter Diana and husband Thomas, in the 1930s
During the Second World War, both her son Volek and step-son Peter served for the British forces. Peter went into the army, while Volek was a radio operator in the air force.
A coup d’etat in Iraq in April 1941, in favour of the German and Italian forces, meant they had to move in a hurry. The story goes that the family were having breakfast when a soldier on a motorcycle arrived, who was in favour of the coup, and held the family at gunpoint. Eugenie attempted to reason with the soldier, crying as her husband was being held against an outside wall.
In the nick of time, a police officer arrived and ordered the soldier to leave. He was a family friend, so filled them in on the new political situation. Later that day, on his advice, they left their house and joined other British families in a barbed-wire surrounded ex-military camp on the outskirts of Baghdad. Eugenie and Diana were segregated from Thomas and John. The children made friends immediately, and John in particular treated the month-long experience as a grand adventure. Eugenie and Thomas, however, were worried about their farm and their business, as well as their long-term future.
An image from the coup d’etat in 1941
When released, it was discovered that their house had been bombed by the RAF, as the rebels involved in the coup had used it as headquarters from which to attack RAF Habbaniya. The furniture and carpets had been destroyed, and then anything that was left had been looted by the rebels and some inhabitants of the nearby town.
The success of the previous business enabled Eugenie and Thomas to rebuild their life, however. They moved the family to a hotel on the banks of the River Tigris for a few months, then rented a new large, detached house in an upmarket district called Karadah. Thomas began a new farm across the river, and travelled over every day on a small round boat.
Elsewhere during the war, Eugenie’s brother Paolo was placed in the concentration camp system by the Nazi-allied Italian forces, as he had previously been part of the Russian army and retained political sympathies. He survived the experience.
Her son Volek was not so lucky. He did not return from a mission on a Lancaster bomber near Leipzig in February 1945, and was declared missing and then dead by the British forces. Three members of crew from this mission remained unaccounted for, however, but as far as the official record was concerned, Eugenie’s first son was dead.
Volek, c1940/1941
After the war, her daughter Diana – who had fallen in love with a British man stationed in Iraq – married him in Baghdad, then moved with him to Chippenham in Wiltshire. Youngest son John went to England with her, to be educated. This left Eugenie and Thomas in Iraq to run their business, with no children around them. They remained in their rented house, and Thomas gave up the farm in favour of an import/export business with a couple of partners. This did not do as well as the farm had.
In 1947, Thomas’s first wife died in England. This meant that any barrier to their marrying had ended, and they formalised their union as soon as possible. This took place at St George’s Church in Baghdad, according to the rites of the Church of England. This is the only Anglican church in Iraq, and was built in 1936. Eugenie used the surname Dmitrieff at her marriage, but it is unknown where she took this name from.
However, there was a further twist in the tale of her eldest son Volek. In around 1948, a Russian woman – the friend of a friend – approached Eugenie and Thomas saying that she had a message from Volek, who was apparently alive. The woman had come to Iraq from Turkey, heading for the USA, and said that she had received a message from Volek at the border of Turkey with Russia. Though Russia does not modernly share a border with Turkey, the USSR and Turkey disputed territory in the area at this time.
Volek reputedly had said to tell his mother that he was alive, but captive, but not to make enquiries as it would cause problems. Eugenie and Thomas attempted to find out more, but found nothing, and as far as the British record is concerned the story is as presented to them when Volek was declared dead.
One tale is that the Russians at that time would consider releasing German Prisoners of War, but not captured British or Americans, so if the story Eugenie’s visitor told them is true it may mean that Volek was held in a prison camp for the rest of his days. To this day, the family do not know whether this account was truthful or not.
Eugenie with son John in Iraq in 1953
Dining with Thomas in Iraq in the late 1950s
By 1960, Thomas had a medical problem, so he and Eugenie returned to the UK. He had a severe foot wound, exacerbated by diabetes, which required treatment. He believed that an English doctor would not amputate his limb, as the doctor he had consulted in Iraq had wanted. However, this wasn’t the case. He received treatment in Kent, where his leg was removed, and sadly died a few days later after suffering complications.
This meant that Eugenie had been widowed again, for either the second or third time depending on the eyes of the law. She returned to Iraq to wind up the farming business, gathering what funds she could from what remained. Furniture and Persian carpets were sold. She then came back to the UK. She settled in Chippenham, close to her children, and became part of the local community. She lived in Eastern Avenue, on the Monkton Park estate, in a semi-detached bungalow, and in later life her siblings came over from Italy to visit her.
Eugenie, right, with brother Paulo and daughter Diana, in at home in Chippenham’s Monkton Park.
She missed her husband dreadfully. She made friends with the woman next door, still baked (a layered chocolate sponge cake is remembered by family), and regularly attended bingo with her daughter. Her son John, who also settled in Chippenham, bought her a Persian kitten whom she doted upon.
She died in Chippenham in 1978, and is buried next to Thomas at the town’s St Paul’s Church.
The truth of a marriage, particularly in the 19th century, was often kept behind closed doors. The mud-slinging, he/she/they-said recriminations of a relationship falling to bits can be incredibly tedious, so maybe that’s a good thing.
Historical divorce cases, however, can offer an eye-opening snapshot of mid-century Victorian domestic life, and crucially what relationships were like for women, and what behaviour was considered acceptable. The 145 divorce cases filed in the first six months after an 1857 change of legislation show adultery aplenty (some in brothels), drinking, gambling, bargaining, pleas, bigamy, beatings, throwing of crockery and furniture, various people who nipped out for something and then turned up in New York or New Zealand or Australia, arguments over money and children, and even someone who couldn’t get it up.
There are various widely-accepted broad brushstrokes about divorce at that time. It’s generally known as the preserve of the rich, and was harder for women than men (it was actually virtually impossible for women to bring proceedings until early 1858). Oral histories recount that the stigma followed people around. This persisted into the 20th century and beyond. As 1980s children, we were encouraged to pity peers of “broken homes”, with added undertones that it was somehow the woman’s fault. An older work colleague (c.2006) confided that the village women were suspicious of “our local divorcee” because she was after their husbands – the idea that divorcees, having had regular sex, would chase it again. ONS statistics for 2019 showed that 42% of marriages ended in divorce, so it’s now commonplace, if no less sad.
In terms of women being able to kick their errant man to the curb, the first leap forward was the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857. Before this, divorce was only available to men, had to go through ecclesiastical courts (it was considered a sacrament, whereas the new Act made it a contract), and if someone wanted to remarry it required a complicated annulment process or a private bill in the House of Commons, which both cost a lot of money – hence it was something rare.
The new Act was seen through parliament partly via the campaigning of Caroline Norton (who was awarded a London blue plaque on her former home by English Heritage in April 2021), this came into effect on 1 January 1858. Of those 145 cases, from January to June, 92 of them were brought by women. These women were, effectively, pioneers. Paving the way for other unhappily married couples to try to change their circumstances, though not always successfully.
Petitioner for action under first six months of Matrimonial Causes Act 1857. Source: England and Wales Civil Divorce Records 1858-1918
The new act also meant it wasn’t for just people with stacks of cash. The first of many pauper causes was filed in early May 1858, where Jane Astrope wanted to divorce husband William – and as time went on people on lower incomes saved for years in order to bring their other half to court.
It was still easier for men than women, as all men had to prove was that their wives had taken another lover, whereas a woman had to prove her husband had cheated on her AND beaten her or left her or married someone else too.
Divorce wasn’t the only option under this new act, or even the most common. You could petition for a legal separation (a “Judicial Separation”) which meant wives could escape the worst flying fists. Or ask the court to force your errant husband home. You could also go for nullity, either because your partner was already married, or it remained unconsummated. Earnings and inheritance acquired since a split could also be protected.
Judgement petitioned for by wife under first six months of Matrimonial Causes Act 1857. Source: England and Wales Civil Divorce Records 1858-1918
A prime example of one of these cases is Mary Jane Pascoe, originally from Dublin, who sought to rid herself of husband Charles. He’d originally been a ship broker and commission agent in Dublin, which was a good middle class occupation but not that rich. He had run off to Australia around 1851 to become a miner, presumably as part of the gold rush.
Mary Jane Pascoe, née Wynne, and Charles Pascoe
Mary Jane’s petition of late May 1858 claimed cruelty – he’d given her a venereal disease (probably syphilis).
“… your petitioner’s said husband being infected with the Venereal Disease communicated it to your petitioner by reason where of your petitioner has undergone great bodily pain and her health has been greatly injured.”
Pascoe vs Pascoe, P00012, 1858, England and Wales Civil Divorce Records
Passing on the pox was considered cruelty. Her petition also alleges that had it off with their servant, and another woman in Liverpool, in addition to now being in Australia and having deserted Mary Jane. This should have been enough grounds to meet the criteria set out for women in the 1857 Act. Marriage was now a contract in the eyes of the law, not a sacrament, so proceedings were heard in civil courts.
The court would have attempted to contact him in Australia for an answer. It appears they didn’t get the answer they wanted. Charles filed for divorce from Mary Jane himself from the state of Victoria in 1876. He said they’d written to each other until 1862, and he’d constantly offered to bring her out to join him, but he’d then heard nothing until 1874. His brother-in-law had told him, from his home in Maryland, USA, that Mary Jane had had a child by William Foy of Trinity College, and now he wanted his marriage to end. Mary Jane died in Dublin in 1877, while they were still officially married. This put an end to the matter.
In fact, the first case brought in by a woman after the legislation was introduced fell short of the differences between men and women filing the cases. Ann Deane, née Saunders, of Reading in Berkshire filed for divorce from her husband Arthur on 6th February 1858 (there were three cases in that January, but they appear to have been originally operating under previous rules, and their outcomes are far from clear). They’d married in 1835, and had had nine children. She alleged that her husband frequented bawdy houses, and cheated on her with an actress. However, as her grounds for divorce were merely that he was a cheating git, and he hadn’t beaten her up too, the case could not progress.
We are also talking about an era where marriage was considered sacred and ordained by God, and many women would not have wanted it to officially end even if things had completely gone south. Therefore many women used the other options – protecting property and earnings from the date her husband left, so she wasn’t liable for his lifestyle or debts. A judicial separation, usually used where the beatings were vicious but he hadn’t actually cheated on her, meant they legally separated but her husband still financially supported her. The inequality lasted until 1923, when women could bring divorce proceedings just for adultery alone.
Protection of property and earnings
Sophia Moore, from Portsmouth, was the first of 26 cases in that first six months who wanted to protect her property and earnings from her errant husband. Under the law at the time – the Married Women’s Property Act was 12 years away – once married, any property or money or earnings that a woman had instantly belonged to her husband. So, even if he’d deserted her, as Sophia’s husband Thomas had 14 years earlier, any earnings or property that Sophia had acquired since were legally his. Had he got himself into debt, Sophia would have been legally liable to pay it off.
As it happens, Sophia and Thomas’s case is a fairly tame one for the period. He was steadily being promoted up the ranks of the Royal Marines, so spent large periods of time away at sea. They’d married in 1833, he’d formally deserted her in 1844, but until January 1858 had done the “right thing” and maintained her with a monthly allowance. He’d stopped in January, so in February Sophia entered a plea for her earnings and property from this date to be legally her own. It may be that she’d come into some extra money from the death of a parent. The case didn’t make the papers, but she appears to be successful as she’s on the 1861 census in Paddington living with a servant, and says she’s independent. However, she also claims to be a widow on that document, which she isn’t as Thomas was alive until 1884, and it may be that she used that status to bigamously marry again as she disappears from view thereafter.
Property cases could be far more salacious than this one. Later that February Mary Cartwright of Westminster also filed a similar petition against her husband Edward. However, he was a habitual drunk who’d deserted her in 1839 and didn’t provide anything by way of support. He reappeared in 1844, after the death of her mother, demanding money that she’d just inherited, took it, and then disappeared again. She hadn’t seen or heard anything of him since 1845.
An Act of Parliament in 1864, just six years later, changed the powers of women protecting their property and earnings to make them more difficult to achieve, by allowing a husband to apply for an order to have this protection discharged. This didn’t get repealed for more than 100 years.
Judicial Separation
Harrowing tales of Victorian family life can often be found in the Judicial Separation petitions. These were invariably (though not always) petitioned for in the cases of extreme domestic violence, but where there was no firm evidence of the husband’s adultery so divorce wasn’t possible. In addition, an amount of beating was considered acceptable in this society, where people were regularly physically punished, and a husband could “discipline” his wife – invariably with his fists or a stick. Emotional abuse was also common but wasn’t regarded as cruelty. However abhorrent this sounds to our modern sensibilities, this was parr for the course at the time.
Where the Act was able to help women was where the cruelty veered into something more than the occasional clout. Interestingly though, the first attempt at Judicial Separation (JS) didn’t feature any violence whatsoever. On Friday 5th February gentleman’s daughter Ellen Martin of Russell Square asked for a JS from husband John (who had no profession whatsoever). He married her the previous summer but didn’t spent a great deal of time with her. He left, took up with someone called Kate, and went to Brighton with her instead posing as husband and wife. He denied the accusations, however, and the case appears to have been dropped.
The second JS case through the courts on 9th February, where Londoner Sarah Peacock née Cuthbert accused her husband Alexander of adultery and requested a separation, again didn’t feature any violence. Sarah got the judgement she wanted in the end.
The third JS, however, is grim reading. This was filed on 20th February, and became the first jury case heard under Act when it went to court in May. Louisa Tomkins née Hudson left Farringdon Market potato salesman Thomas Tomkins in January after a catalogue of violence and threats. He would frequently use his fists on her if he felt she needed some chastisement and this situation had continued since 1851.
“… the said Thomas Tomkins at Shoe Lane Fleet Street in the City of London grossly abused and threatened your Petitioner and beat her and otherwise treated her with great cruelty whereby her health was materially affected.”
Tomkins vs Tomkins, T00006, 1858, England and Wales Civil Divorce Records
“The petitioner having being sworn, deposed that her husband was a very ill-tempered person, who was in the habit of knocking her about when he was in a passion. On one occasion he had beaten her because she said that a woman whom he had called a respectable sort of person was not so. They had had quarrels about another woman, towards the child of whom her husband made a regular payment. Her husband threatened to bring the child into his house, in order to punish witness. If she ever made a mistake in her accounts he would abuse her; and on one occasion, when she had returned late from Woolwich, he beat her with his fists.”
West Middlesex Herald, Saturday 8 May 1858
In January 1858 he’d held her down by her hair and had beaten her around the head, from which she was still suffering in court, and threatened her with further violence too. She had left him, and had gone home to her mother, taking her children with her. Thomas insisted that this was untrue and asked the court to force her back home. The court for Louisa, and she received her JS. The judge in the case said that he wanted future cases like this one to be heard behind closed doors. As to what happened to Louisa next, the records have remained elusive.
Nullity
A case of impotence led to a petition for the marriage to be annulled on 12th February 1858, a Wednesday. French citizen Alphonsine Isaacson had married British husband Ebenezer Silver twice, as was required by French law, once at Paris town hall and again at the Synagogue. However, the marriage was never consummated due to his supposed lack of ability to rise to the occasion (she entreated the court to examine his reproductive organs, to see she was correct), and he’d left her.
“That at the time of the civil and religious marriages the said Ebenezer David Silver was and has ever since been and now is naturally and incurably impotent and incapable of generation as on due examination of him will appear.”
Isaacson vs Isaacson, I00001, 1858, England and Wales Civil Divorce Records
She believed he was living in Cheapside. The case does not appear to have made the newspapers. Ebenezer, a doctor with the East India Company, was an expert on diseases of the anus and rectum, and when Alphonsine tried again in 1869 for a separation on the grounds of cruelty he claimed he was previously legally married to someone else and that there wasn’t a case to answer.
Restoration of conjugal rights
There were four cases for restoration of conjugal rights brought by women too, in that first six months. The first of these was on 2nd March, where Eliza Kyan of Brompton petitioned the court to force her husband John back to live with her and their children, him having refused to do so since November 1857. Restoring him to the marital home would have meant Eliza had help parenting the kids, and also would have known that her financial situation was stable, whatever state their marriage was in. Divorce was not an option for this pairing, as they were both Catholic.
Divorce with adultery and desertion
As for the 22 wives who attempted to get a divorce in that first six months, two were automatic fails as there wasn’t enough evidence. The first one filed, on 8th February 1858, which successfully went through the courts was the petition of Esther Pyne née Varley, who had grounds via adultery and desertion of above two years. Her husband of 30 years, George, a renowned watercolour painter, had gradually put the couple into debt due to an addiction to gaming and gambling, and was unable to support them. He’d also committed adultery while drunk, went to France without her to try to earn his living again and deserted her, leaving her without income. Esther had relied upon her father for support, and started teaching music, though George would occasionally write to her and ask for money. Ten years later, and based in Chelsea, she discovered him living in Oxford with another woman and their four children. George didn’t contest Esther’s petition, and the divorce was granted. She remarried the following year, to solicitor Charles Willesford, and lived with him in Devon to the end of her days.
One of Esther’s husband George Pyne’s paintings, of Oriel College, Oxford.
Divorce with adultery and bigamy
The first divorce case brought by a woman where he’d cheated on her and married someone else too was filed in the second week of February, and included desertion for a three-pronged attack. Grace Robotham, née Halford, married Thomas in Clerkenwell in 1849, and they had two daughters. However, he also married Leonora King in 1856, while Grace was still alive, and to avoid the consequences fled to New York. She asked for custody of the children, and for her marriage to end – but as Thomas was abroad the court sought him out for a possible defence, indicating that they’d unusually take his father’s word instead if they were unable to locate him. The case got no further mention, but there’s no sign of Thomas or Leonora in the UK from this point onwards, and Grace and her daughters went to live with her parents in Clerkenwell. Grace reverted to her maiden name, indicating that the divorce probably went through, but called herself a widow.
Divorce causes petitioned for by wife under first six months of Matrimonial Causes Act 1857. Source: England and Wales Civil Divorce Records 1858-1918
Divorce with adultery and cruelty
The first cases of a wife petitioning for divorce with adultery and cruelty took longer to come through the system. Jessie Sudlow attempted to use cruelty alongside adultery in her petition against husband Alfred in early March 1858, but it turned out that Alfred had died before the case was heard in April. Therefore Jessie was a widow and didn’t need a divorce. Emma Weatherill also included cruelty in her case against deserted and adulterous husband George, who was in Sydney when she filed on 13th April. The cruelty wasn’t particularly clear cut, and it was felt there was enough evidence on desertion and adultery, so that part of the case was dropped.
The first woman’s divorce case petitioned for that included cruelty as part of the case was brought by Eliza Brunell, wife of early photographer Theodore, who had famously taken photographs of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s children in 1852.
Theodore Brunell’s portraits of Queen Victoria’s children
Widowed Eliza, née Bush, who kept an inn at Weymouth that still exists, had married second husband Theodore in January 1857. In the 17 months before she filed for divorce, he’d not only visited houses of ill-fame, and committed various acts of adultery, but had also assaulted a little girl by hitting her with a stick and was serving time when she filed for divorce. His catalogue of vile behaviour towards Eliza is extreme.
“The said Theodore Brunell spit upon your Petitioner and used and applied to her disgusting and obscene names and language and threatened to set fire to the House where your Petitioner was then residing and threatened never to have any peace with your Petitioner, and on… (6.1.1857)… the bedclothes of your Petitioner were found burnt, and your Petitioner verily believes the same to have been burnt by the said Theodore Brunell for the purpose of annoying and intimidating your Petitioner.”
Brunell vs Brunell, B00012, 1858, England and Wales Civil Divorce Records
He also spat, threatened her with knives and various dinner utensils, cut her, and hit her with a heavy stick in public. Within 20 days of the marriage they weren’t living together anymore.
Eliza got her divorce, granted in May 1859, and remarried soon after to James Board – who moved into the pub to help her run it, and they had a whole ream of children. Theodore continued on his downward spiral, and on the 1861 census he’s in the police jail cell, coincidentally next door to Eliza’s pub. He committed suicide a few months later. Eliza lived until 1875.
Mud-slinging apart, it’s hard not to be struck at just how human the lives are we see within these legal pages. The Victorian age is so often characterised as stilted and an attempt to live good, pure and Godly lives, enhanced by the stiff sepia poses of their portraits. If it wasn’t for obvious colloquial language differences, and evolved societal norms, you could quite easily see these break-ups being discussed over a bottle of prosecco at a top London bar. Time may have moved on, and we now wouldn’t accept some of the things that happen in a marriage – e.g. flying fists – and rightly so, but people are still people.
Caroline Norton’s story and campaign may have spearheaded change, but the cases of Jane, Mary Jane, Ann, Sophia, Mary, Ellen, Sarah, Alphonsine, Louisa, Eliza Kyan, Esther, Grace, Jessie, Emma, Eliza Brunell and the rest of the 92 women were all pioneering in their own way and helped to open up legal proceedings and recompense for the women who followed. There’s no doubt that the lives of the wives may have improved in the cases petitioned for by the 53 husbands in the first six months of the act. But these women were using the new legislation for themselves, and in many cases winning.
The Women Who Made Me 