While I love the research and writing of these blogs and articles, mass written content doesn’t always work for every user.
Therefore, I present a video on a bakers’ dozen women from Chippenham, produced for local history month and commissioned by Chippenham Museum and Heritage Centre.
While becoming a widow is a tragedy at any time, an era when your husband was the main or only breadwinner could be particularly harsh on the woman left behind. Poorer women would have to take in work – often extra laundry or charwoman jobs – alongside bringing up their children, and if they couldn’t do that they’d end up on poor relief or in the workhouse. Widows with older children might have found factory or mill work, if their older children could look after the younger, but all this would have to be fitted around family life and other duties expected of women.
In contrast, if a woman from an upper-class background was widowed the tragedy was no less but the economic impact on her life was significantly different. This was the case for Louisa, who was able to fall back on family when she lost her husband at the age of 31.
She was born at the tail end of the 1820s, the penultimate child and third daughter of an extremely wealthy Surrey landowner. Her father, John Spicer, had made a considerable amount of money as a merchant and a stockbroker and had bought a large house – Esher Place, a little way south of Hampton Court Palace – from the descendants of former Prime Minister Henry Pelham in 1805. He knocked the entire property down and rebuilt it to suit his own tastes. Eleven years after acquiring the property he married Louisa’s mother, and gradually started producing his family. Louisa was the 7th of eight children, with four older brothers. One took up soldiering, another joined the navy, and the other two went into the church. There were then twin sisters four years her senior, and when she was around six her sister Sophia was born.
A year later, her second oldest brother, Phillip, who was then around 19, died at sea. He’d been midshipman aboard the HMS Wanderer, and died on passage home from Sierra Leone – at that point a British colony, with troops based in Freetown.
Around the age of nine Louisa was sent to be educated at a private girls’ school in nearby Richmond on Thames. Before then her education would have been at home under a governess and her mother, but as with most wealthy families children were sent to school at about the age of nine. It’s likely that her twin sisters, Anna and Mary, also went to this school, and her younger sister Sophia too when the time was right. The family’s boys would have been sent further afield for their education.
If Louisa followed the experience of Anna and Mary, once her education was finished she would have come home to be debuted into society and await her eventual husband. Anna did not manage to make a match, as she died in 1842 at the age of 18, but Mary married her cousin Julian – a reverend – in 1853.
Louisa’s husband, Edmund Clutterbuck, came along in 1851 a few days before her 22nd birthday. He was heir to a large house and estate at Chippenham, in Wiltshire, miles away from her home in Surrey. It’s likely that they met during a summer season in either London or Bath. His family had been landowners in Wiltshire for several generations, initially in Bradford-on-Avon and from the mid 1820s in Chippenham when his father had purchased Hardenhuish House. Thomas, Edmund’s father, had become Sheriff of Wiltshire for a year in 1826.
Louisa moved into Hardenhuish House with Edmund and his family. As the heir, he lived there with both his parents and his shortly-to-be-married sister Fanny, as well as a cousin on his mother’s side and various visitors. The house, which was built in the later part of the 18th century, had ten live-in servants and had had various additions by Sir John Soane in 1829, at the behest of Edmund’s father Thomas. Although it had been enlarged considerably by the family, the number of servants in 1851 (ten) can be compared to those at Louisa’s father’s estate in Surrey (18) and show that the property was smaller than that which Louisa had been used to.
The following year, Thomas died and Edmund inherited the house and living, and became Sheriff of Wiltshire himself in 1854. Louisa also gave birth to her first child, a son named Edmund after his father. She would have taken on the duties of the squire’s wife, visiting the poor and sick at his side, supporting him through business, and appearing with him at church and other official functions. A second son, Walter, followed a year later.
In 1855 two of Louisa’s siblings moved to the area. Her eldest brother, John William Gooch Spicer, bought and renovated the house and estate at Spye Park, just to the south of Chippenham.
Her younger sister Sophia also married Edmund’s younger brother Daniel – a military officer who she had probably met through Louisa – and moved first to Chippenham and then to nearby Bath as they established their family.
Louisa had three more children in the following years – daughter Henrietta, son Newton (who died before he was two) and finally daughter Mary in 1860. However, Edmund’s health was in a decline by this point. His eventual obituaries say that his strength was on the wane, and he was gradually getting thinner and more emaciated over a long period of time, which perhaps points to cancer or diabetes. He spent time away from home for his health, as the Victorians believed spas and seaside environments would help those with health issues, but nothing helped him. He died aged 36, while on one of these health visits, in Torquay in February of 1861, and was buried at the church at Hardenhuish. Louisa became a widow, with four dependent children, at the age of not-quite-31. Eldest son Edmund was in his first year at boarding school (he and his brother Walter are known to have attended Eton), while youngest Mary was still a babe-in-arms.
The end of Edmund’s obituary reads:
“Who will forbear to hope but that another of his name will in future years worthily fill his, now vacant, position? Who will not offer a prayer that the bereaved wife and children may be supported in their grievous trial by ‘The Father of Mercies and the God of all comfort?’”
Practically, Hardenhuish needed another squire, and a nine-year-old boy away at school was not going to be able to fulfil that role. Louisa and her children needed somewhere else to go while her son Edmund grew up to inherit his title. The solution appears to have been solved by Louisa’s older brother. He seems to have arranged for the family to live at Whetham House, a smaller property between his estate at Spye Park and that of the Marquis of Lansdown at Bowood, with a few servants to meet their needs. Whether the house was tied to his property or he purchased it isn’t clear, but Louisa’s inheritance from Edmund and the £2,000 she received when her father died in 1862 would have helped the household. Her mother died in 1863, and she may well have inherited more money from her father’s estate then.
Meanwhile, a Reverend Benjamin Winthrop and his family lived at Hardenhuish House and took on the role of squire. He had come in from Wolverton, in Warwickshire, and he and his wife and children lived at the house until Louisa’s sons came of age.
Walter also went away to be educated, and Edmund studied at Oxford University to become a barrister. Louisa seems to have kept her daughters closer though, and instead of sending them away to school appears to have either educated them locally or at home. Her life would have been quieter than that she had when wife of the squire, as she would not have had many official duties and occasions to attend, and instead probably kept within an upper-class social sphere.
Once Edmund came of age in 1873, aged 21, he was able to take on his inherited squire title. Reverend Winthrop moved out of Hardenhuish House, and Edmund moved back in. Louisa stayed at Whetham House with the rest of the family, and did not take up residence at the house that had formerly been hers. He married Madeline Raikes at Chittoe near Spye Park in 1880, his youngest sister Mary was a bridesmaid and his brother Walter was groomsman. Curiously, Louisa is not mentioned in newspaper reports of the wedding – it may be that it was just assumed that people would know she attended, or that something prevented her being there. Her first grandchild, a girl named Henrietta, was born a year later.
However, Louisa’s health was now failing too, which may also have prevented her from attending her son’s wedding. She died while still living at Whetham, aged 53, in the summer of 1882, and left over a thousand pounds to her beneficiaries.
Her son Edmund went on to have ten children in all. Her other three remaining children all married over the next few years, with Walter becoming a pioneering early photographer who travelled widely – including Japan and a trip on a sealing vessel to the Arctic. Hardenhuish House remained in the Clutterbuck family though, until her grandson – another Edmund – died in 1938 and the property was sold to the people of Chippenham to become part of the town’s grammar school. It still remains a school, and most of the administrative offices sit within the old walls.
Some siblings luckily share a tight sisterly bond, others are as different as night and day – and while they love each other and share a background, other values like politics can vastly differ within family members of the same generation. And this is equally true for those born of a privileged background as well as those from more modest beginnings.
Thermuthis and Lucy were sisters who exemplified this difference between siblings. Two of three daughters born to a landed squire in Wiltshire at the tail end of the 1850s, they had a comfortable upbringing for the time, and a great deal of money and influence behind them. But where Thermuthis followed the typical politics and activities of landed gentry at the time, Lucy turned her back 180 degrees on this lifestyle and instead worked tirelessly with the poor and underprivileged to make the world a better place.
Both women make brief appearances in Francis Kilvert’s diaries of the 1870s, as Squire Reverend Robert Martin Ashe – their father – was part of the landed gentry circles that Kilvert moved in at that time. Kilvert mentions dining at Langley House, their home, on several occasions during the diary, and there is a detailed description of Thermuthis in his writings.
Thermuthis Ashe was the eldest sister, born in 1856. She was her parents’ second-born child, but her older brother – named Robert after his father – had died a year earlier of whooping cough and convulsions aged about 18 months. Another sister – Emily Ashe, known to the family as Syddy or Syddie – followed in 1857, and then Lucy Ashe was born in 1859. There were no further children, and no boy to inherit the house and title, so Thermuthis became heir apparent until such time as she married, as under the law at the time a husband would assume the wife’s property.
The three sisters would have enjoyed the best of country life growing up at that time, going into the nearby market town at Chippenham for anything that they needed, as Langley Burrell where they lived was a small village. Kilvert described Thermuthis, known as Thersie, on a visit to their house in January of 1871, when she would have been around fifteen.
“25 January 1871
A fly took Fanny, Dora and myself to dinner at Langley House at 7.30. The Ashes were very agreeable and Thersie Ashe was in the drawing room before dinner sitting on an ottoman in a white dress, white boots and gloves, almost a grown-up young lady and looking exceedingly nice with her long dark hair and brilliant colour.”
Kilvert’s gaze also fell upon Emily Ashe towards the end of that year, when she was around fourteen:
Wednesday 27 December 1871
After dinner I went with Dora to call at the John Knights’ at the farm on the common. At the cross roads we met Mrs Ashe with Thersie and Syddy going round to the cottages giving the invitations to the New Year’s supper at Langley House. Syddy is magnificent entirely, splendidly handsome. I never thought her so beautiful before. Her violet eyes, her scarlet lips, the luxuriance of her rich chestnut curling hair, indescribable. She is said by my mother to be very like her great grandmother, especially in her chestnut curling hair.
Youngest sister Lucy does not appear to have been mentioned at all, at least in the published portion of Kilvert’s diaries.
Both the 1861 and 1871 censuses find the family at home in Langley Burrell with eight servants in residence – in the early years the girls would have had a nursemaid, and later on a governess, and the house had a housekeeper, a cook and various other domestic maids. Their father, who though a reverend who could technically be in charge of the local St Peter’s Church, concentrated mostly on the running of the parish and passed the church over to Kilvert’s father. He was also a magistrate and justice of the peace in Chippenham. A newspaper report of the time says that Robert Ashe suffered some ill health and spent time abroad in better climates. Thermuthis, Emily, Lucy and their mother would also have played a great part in the parish life growing up, and the sisters by the standards of the day would have been expected to grow up into genteel young ladies and marry well, probably from among the local gentry. Their father apparently did not approve of mixed dancing, or even mixed tennis for his daughters, so it is likely that their contact with young men was limited.
However, their mother died at the end of 1884 – when they were around 27, 26 and 24 – and their father a month later in January 1885, supposedly of a broken heart following his wife’s death. Thermuthis then inherited the house, and became the landowner, and Emily and Lucy lived at the house with her just as before. None of them showed any inclination of marrying for a good while. Emily eventually did marry, in 1891 to Edward Scott, a soldier. She then moved away, and had children of her own, living for a time in India. Neither Thermuthis nor Lucy ever married.
Thermuthis, as lady of the manor, assumed various duties of public life. She was deeply involved in village affairs, donating and supporting the poor and needy within the community, and a supporter of the village church that had been in her family for generations. Clearly extremely religious, she acted as a church warden, and one of the few female wardens in the diocese in the early 20th century (it was part of the wider Bristol diocese), attending the diocesan conference regularly. She also served on the ruri-decanal conference, an event concerning rural parishes.
Langley House remained a focal point for the community under her tenure as it was during her father’s day. The extensive grounds were used for political meetings, village and church fétes – there are mentions of her having entered gardening competition categories at various fétes and produce shows in the newspapers of the time. Her other chief hobby was archery, and she was often seen practicing this in the grounds of the house, right up until several months before her death. At her demise she was one of the oldest members known of the Society of Wiltshire Archers. She was also a member of the local Beaufort Hunt, but did not actually ride with them – instead providing land for the practice.
Politically, she was a staunch Conservative, perhaps typically for a landowner of her background, and was head of the local Women’s Conservative Association. Lord Londonderry – a cousin of Winston Churchill – once addressed a political meeting at her residence. She gradually sold off pieces of land that she had inherited – she’d owned West Kennet Manor through a connection of her great grandmother, but sold it in 1921. She also owned a local patch of woodland – Bird’s Marsh – and various extensive parcels of land via the church holdings that extended down into Chippenham itself, as part of what is now the town was a section of Langley Burrell Within parish. Several of these were sold off in the later years of her life, and her name is now remembered on streets created on the land itself – so Ashfield Road, Ashe Crescent and Ashe Close stand as memorials.
Thermuthis Ashe died in 1935 after a short illness, aged 78. She is buried at St Peter’s Church in Langley Burrell.
Her younger sister Lucy, in complete contrast, turned away from the Conservative and landowning lifestyle of Thermuthis in the early years of the 20th century, and instead moved away to live in London and perform social work among deprived communities. She had intended only to stay in London for a week or so, but ended up staying for more than forty years. She was visiting Emily and her family in Kent on the 1901 census, with no profession given, but ten years later she was resident at the Twentieth Century Club in Notting Hill. She apparently said “I throw in my lot with yours. I stay among you.” when she experienced life in Southwark, and did so wholeheartedly.
This residence was a ladies club, founded in 1902, which had 105 bedrooms and was there for the purpose “to provide furnished residential rooms and board at economical prices, for educated women workers engaged in professional, educational, literary, secretarial or other similar work.” Lucy’s profession on the 1911 census was given as a Honorary Secretary of a Charity Organisation living on private means, which fits the remit of the club. While she lived there, she had income from another London property and presumably some inheritance to live on which initially gave her means to survive while working, but within a short time she largely financed her own work. The club had ceased to exist by 1924, so after this point Lucy lived elsewhere in Southwark where most of her work took place.
She is remembered as a particularly dedicated and tireless worker, regularly putting in unpaid 18-hour days for the benefit of the borough’s poorest residents. Southwark of the time was known for being a place of poor housing and tough living, with parts regularly flooded by the Thames and families crammed into one room in back to back accommodation and sharing one toilet with several neighbours. A large drive was underway to remove the slums and replace them with better quality housing – this was a big part of Lloyd George’s Liberal government – and Lucy joined this effort.
At the beginning of the First World War she concentrated on helping the families of the borough who had their main breadwinner serving overseas – so focusing on mothers and children in the most part. This work led to being made the first Chairman of the Child Welfare Committee in 1919. She was also on the very first Pensions Committee in the early 1920s and – in direct contrast to her sister Thermuthis – was elected as a Labour Party member of Southwark Council. In later years she served as an Alderman for Southwark. Her work passions also included the health of residents, particularly around the care of people who had contracted tuberculosis.
She had a small office in Steedman Street from where she offered advice and help to the people she represented and served, and would paint and sell pictures to finance the help she was able to give. Hundreds of people benefitted from her work, and knew her as “the lady with the satchel”.
She was only persuaded to leave Southwark and the people and streets she loved at the height of the Second World War blitz, with bombs regularly falling into the nearby roads. Six people took over the work that she had done alone. At this time she was into her 80s, and her health was beginning to suffer after all the years of hard work. Some residents thought she had succumbed to a bomb, but in reality she moved home to Langley House in Wiltshire – which at this time was owned by Emily’s son Major Charles Scott-Ashe – for the duration.
Her office in Steedman Street was bombed, as were many other places in the borough. After the war, she was remembered by a block of flats bearing her name in Peacock Street.
Her health was not good enough for her to return after the war, and she lived quietly at Langley Burrell for the rest of her life. She died in 1949, on her 90th birthday, and was remembered later that year with a memorial in the grounds of St Peter’s Church. In her will she left £150 to the Southwark Labour Party. A primary school now sits on the site of the block of flats in Peacock Street.
Daughter of a baronet, Griselda was a considerable part of the movement to collect and preserve British folk music, spearheaded by Cecil Sharp. While the women who are mostly remembered tend to be the collectors themselves – Lucy Broadwood, Maud Karpeles, Mary Neal, Kate Lee – as their work is filed in libraries and is therefore still visible, rather than those who gave more physical support. Griselda, as headmistress and founder of her own private school, was able to give space to early English Folk Dance Society and Folk Song Society activities and summer schools, and supported the movement and the songs and dances’ preservation that way. She was a believer in giving the knowledge and information that had been collected back to the people and sections of society that might have become detached from whence it came, and worked at a grassroots level to encourage everyone to know and experience folk songs and dances from the British Isles.
Griselda never really knew her mother, a daughter of East India Company civil servant Sir Thomas Metcalfe who died when she was two after giving birth to her youngest brother. She was second youngest in a family of 13 siblings – although her sister Pamela died at the age of 2 – and had two sisters who lived and nine brothers. Her eldest siblings had been born in Bengal, where her colonel father had been stationed, but the family returned to England in the early 1860s. They first lived at various different army bases, but by the time Griselda arrived in the later years of that decade they had been established in Herefordshire for many years.
As upper-class Victorian children, Griselda and her siblings had domestic servants, a nursemaid, and a governess at home until they reached the age of nine or so. Thereafter, they were sent away to school. The family’s boys appear to have gone to a school run by a vicar in Ashbocking, Suffolk, while the girls went to West Grinstead Lodge at Belstead, also in Suffolk.
It was here, while at school with her older sister Finetta, that Griselda would have learnt of her father’s death in 1882, at around the age of 12. The barony went to her older brother Guy, who at this point was out in India serving in the army, while it seems likely that Griselda continued at school, later moving to further study at Westfield College in Hampstead which was a women-only institution founded in 1882. Some of her brothers also went out to India with the army, while others took up professions in the church.
On leaving school, Griselda went to live with her brother Francis, who later became a reverend, but in the early part of his career he held a position of assistant second clerk in library of the British Museum. Her eldest sister Annie also lived with them, as did her youngest brother George. Neither Annie nor Griselda had to work, and the household had a servant, so it was likely that they were still comfortably off.
In 1894 Griselda married Dudley, who was both the son of a Lord and a prominent (if understated) member of the Royal Asiatic Society. An authority on the Malay language, he had spent considerable time in the Far East before marriage, and was also appointed a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society, and published papers in both society’s journals. He was 20 years her senior.
They had three children together. A son, named Dudley, arrived a year after the marriage. Another son, Ambrose, followed four years later but sadly only lived for two weeks. And a daughter, also named Griselda, was born in 1901.
They settled in Aldeburgh, on the Suffolk coast, at around the time Elizabeth Garrett Anderson lived in the town, and employed a cook, a parlourmaid, and a lady’s nurse – which implies that Griselda’s health could be on the delicate side.
In 1906 they turned their residence into a private school for girls, with Griselda as headmistress. The fact that it was a private school meant that she, as a married woman, was able to hold the position and teach her pupils – had the school been run by a local education board she would have been subject to the marriage bar on female teachers.
The school was called Belstead House, named for the location of her former school, and was for girls “of breeding and means”. When the school began there were only seven pupils, but by the 1911 census this had grown to 17, and numbers continued to expand over the next decade. In 1911 there was one other teacher in addition to Griselda, and a full complement of domestic staff to look after the family and the pupils, who ranged in age from 11 to 16.
In 1911, her husband Dudley took a tumble from a pony and trap and broke his shoulder bone, which festered. and he died a week later. Griselda maintained the school, and together with her two children and house full of staff, continued to run it as a success. The reputation of the school was extremely good, and it attracted interest from many families who could afford the fees.
They took on adjoining premises to accommodate more pupils, building a gymnasium and a chapel, and even a domestic science laboratory – the subject during this period looked more at the actual science and technology of food and domestic chores, rather than teaching girls how to do them, and was a route into science for many young women.
Her son Dudley, who was educated elsewhere, went to fight in the first world war, and was able to come home afterwards. He married in 1926. Her daughter Griselda was educated at her mother’s school and went on to become an actress.
Griselda senior’s link to the British folk revival came through her friendship with Cecil Sharp himself. Her later obituary reports that she was a strong believer in the educational value of folk songs and dances, which aligned with Sharp’s own views. She incorporated folk songs and dances in the curriculum she taught at the school, encouraging those best at the art forms to go out into the communities just outside Aldeburgh to help local girls and young women form folk music groups and companies of their own. She was awarded one of the first two gold badges (the highest accolade) by the English Folk Dance Society – which later incorporated with the Folk Song Society in 1932 to form EFDSS – in 1922. The other recipient was Lady Mary Trefusis, who is commemorated with a hall named after her in London’s Cecil Sharp House, but no real mention of Griselda is evident on those premises today and even her gold badge names her as “Mrs Dudley Hervey” rather than using her own first name.
In addition, she also invited Cecil Sharp’s Summer Festival School to make use of the school buildings as their headquarters when the venture outgrew previous accommodation at Cheltenham College. This – the last summer school that Sharp ran himself – took place in 1923. Several hundred people attended, working on dances and songs, and Sharp gave lectures. Griselda kept a scrap book, containing photographs, programmes and correspondence about the event, which is now held by the University of California.
The revival and preservation spirit was so deeply embedded in the school’s philosophy that when Romanian pianist and composer Béla Bartók was invited to give a concert to the pupils in December 1923, he found that the girls were completely capable of learning and following Romanian folk dances without much bother.
In addition to the emphasis on the folk arts, Griselda’s school also focused on French, and actively prepared girls for university education. She was also keen to promote good living and bodily welfare to her pupils, which included establishing a “clean milk” dairy for the school’s use, and worked on matters of faith and spirituality across the whole school. She was local deputy commissioner for the girl guides too, and worked with young people across the Aldeburgh community as well as her pupils.
In the later 1920s, however, she was in poor health. She died at the school in 1929, in her early 60s, of heart failure. Her elder sister Finetta, who had married and spent considerable time in India, then came to run the school in her stead for a few years, maintaining the values that had been established and sustained under Griselda. The school building is now a holiday home for Aldeburgh’s thriving tourist trade.
*****
A footnote should give more history of her daughter Griselda, who went on to be an actress as Grizelda Hervey. She appeared on stage in Ireland in 1923, and newspapers report her role as the Spirit of Kent in a pageant of 1931. Much of her renowned work was broadcast on the radio – for example the BBC broadcast a play called Congo Landing by Horton Giddy in 1935, which was an account of the adventures of Lady Susan (Grizelda) and Captain Smith (Stewart Rome) in the Cape Town Air Race. She was also in the cast of the first broadcast of the Forsyth Saga in 1945, when the BBC Home Service put on A Man of Property with Grizelda as Irene.
She also appeared in extremely early live broadcast television plays on the BBC. Two of these were The Royal Family of Broadway, and The Circle, both from 1939. Television at this time was broadcast live to anyone who had a set, and no recordings of these plays were ever kept. Later television work included one episode of The Wednesday Play in 1966. She also appears to have consistently worked in theatres.
In September of 1957 she married Clarence Napier Bruce, third baron Aberdare of Duffryn. In early October that year the couple were in Yugoslavia to attend a meeting of the International Olympic Committee at Sofia, and planned to drive home through the country as their honeymoon. Their car fell over a precipice near Risan, into water. Clarence drowned, leaving Grizelda a widow after being married for just one month, and she herself was injured in the fall. To the end of her days – she died in Hull in 1980 – she was styled Baroness Aberdare of Duffryn.
Chippenham was built on the cloth trade, with many small-scale weavers having looms in their homes to produce material once the thread had been dyed. By the mid-1800s, however, mechanisation and larger scale industry had led to the establishment of a full cloth mill.
This mill, which offered carding, dyeing, spinning and weaving, sat on the banks of the River Avon where the Hygrade meat factory later sat, a site which is now new apartment housing along Westmead Lane.
This mill, owned by Pocock and Rawlings, was one of the biggest employers in Chippenham towards the latter half of the 19th century, alongside the railway works, and the Nestle factory. By 1911 the workforce numbered around 130, the bulk of which were unmarried younger women. One of these women was Ellen, alongside at least four of her siblings.
Ellen’s father – Julius – was a weaver at the factory throughout the 19th century, and married his wife Julia in 1871. There’s some discrepancy about where this took place – both St Andrew’s Church and the Wesleyan Methodists have a record of the marriage. They had nine children in all, of which Ellen was the fourth, born in the mid-1870s.
The family, while clearly non-conformist in religion – like much of Chippenham at the time – appeared to be unable to decide which branch of non-conformism suited them best. Ellen was baptised into the Primitive Methodist faith, as were her sisters Anne, Elizabeth and Frances. However, her brothers Frederick and Arthur, and her sister Florence were baptised into the Wesleyan Methodists, and her sister Emily was christened at the Tabernacle church.
Although their parents married from Blind Lane (now Gladstone Road), while they were young, Ellen and her siblings lived on Factory Lane, modernly known as Westmead Lane, while their father worked at the cloth mill at the end of the road. Their grandfather, a dyer, also worked at the mill and lived next door. As they grew up, Ellen’s siblings gradually went to work for the cloth mill themselves. One of them, Anne, died at the age of one, but the rest all grew up to bring in a wage to the family. They found work in the mill themselves, and the condensed milk factory, and the railway.
In the late 1880s, when Ellen was about 14, the family moved out of Factory Lane into new houses on Parliament Street. While today this street is part of Chippenham, at that time the houses were outside the town’s boundaries, administratively in Lowden, and it would have been quiet compared to Factory Lane. This would have been a desirable move for a large family.
Around about this time, Ellen left school and started work. Her first job was in the Nestle Condensed Milk Factory. It’s unknown exactly what she did in the factory, but younger workers often were general factory hands – fetching and carrying, and menial tasks – and would gain specific knowledge and skills as they worked.
In 1892, when Ellen was 18, her father died suddenly. He’d been conducting a service at the Primitive Methodist Church in Kington St Michael, and had walked home with Ellen’s next youngest sister Elizabeth. As they went past the Police Station in New Road Julius collapsed and died, aged 42. An inquest said he’d had a weak heart all his life. Ellen’s mother Julia was left a widow with several very young children, and the eldest children had to support the family.
One of the girls went to work as a domestic servant in Bristol, and one of the boys as a railway porter in London, but the rest of the siblings stayed local. Ellen and three of her sisters went to work in the cloth mill. Two of them became weavers, having almost certainly learnt the trade from their father, while Ellen became a harness mender.
A harness mender did not relate to horses used at the mill, and instead referred to the mechanisms that drove the weaving looms. These were called harnesses, and Ellen’s job would have been to maintain them. This was specialist work, and appears to have usually fallen to men, so Ellen’s technical skill set appears to have been unusual. Other women at the mill worked as weavers, wool carders, spinners, spoolers, cutters, wharpers, beaters, machinists and general hands.
The Waterford Cloth Mill, also known as Pocock and Rawlings, took on workers from around the age of 14. When a young man married he could expect to keep his job, as he needed this to support his family. However, young women were expected to give up their jobs at the mill when they married, as they then had the responsibilities of a household and family. Some did keep their jobs – in 1911 there were eight married women at the mill, as opposed to 60 unmarried women and two widows – but this was driven by economic circumstance rather than propriety.
Significantly, Ellen and several of her sisters did not marry, so kept their jobs and lived with their mother. This may have been driven by the need to keep their family household going in the face of the loss of income that their father’s early death caused, but also may be down to lack of opportunity or a wish to keep their jobs.
By 1911, Ellen was in her thirties and had been the harness mender for over ten years, while her sisters Louisa and Emily were weavers. Another sister, Florence, had died in 1909, and had worked at the mill as a cutter.
1915 saw a devastating fire which destroyed the Waterford Mill almost entirely. The five-storey main building, along with the rest of the outbuildings complex, was damaged beyond repair. This sounded the death knell for the textile industry in Chippenham, despite it continuing healthily in nearby towns like Trowbridge, as the factory was not rebuilt. Pocock and Rawlings did continue in some capacity until around 1930, but most of the workers lost their jobs. It’s unknown where Ellen worked after this, as employment records were sketchy and not in the public domain, but it’s possible that she continued with Pocock and Rawlings due to her skills. Other option would have been to go to Saxby and Farmer, and join the local women working in munitions there during the First World War. She may also have taken the same choice as her sister Emily, and returned to work at the Condensed Milk Factory.
Ellen’s mother Julia died in 1929, and whatever work Ellen was doing at this point she gave up to become the householder at Parliament Street. Her sister Emily lived with her, as did her sister Louisa on occasion.
Ellen died in 1948, aged 74. The house was then passed on to her sisters.
One gender disparity of the Victorian age was that, if a landlady of a pub was married, the license for the premises was invariably held in her husband’s name – even if he held another job elsewhere and the day-to-day running of the pub was left to her. In an era where women not working was prized as an elite aim, the pub landlady and her daughters appeared exempt. Women were sometimes referred to as the “hostess” of the establishment, which gave them status in a place that was usually regarded as a men’s domain. Women did drink in pubs during this time period, as beer was often better than water at the time, but not in the bar, and were usually not the type of women to be considered “nice” by the bulk of society. In contrast, the landlady had prestige.
More stringent social mores around women and alcohol came in with the temperance movement, and the Defence Of the Realm Act (DORA) during World War One. Temperance largely being a women’s political issue in the absence of being able to vote, there were social restrictions and expectations that grew around older girls and women entering a pub – particularly alone, as it might be seen that they were hoping to be picked up – and women would only be found in the lounge or snug areas of pubs, or would buy alcohol in a jug through a hatch in the outside wall to take away and drink at home. DORA also brought in restrictions for when alcohol could be sold in on-licensed premises.
Mary Ann, her sister Emma and mother Mary were no exception to the women-run establishment rule of thumb. Her father, Charles, nominally ran a pub in the Wiltshire town of Melksham when she was born in the mid-1840s, and the family later moved to Chippenham to run the town’s Three Crowns Inn, located at the crux of a busy coaching thoroughfare between Bath and London. She was the youngest of three children, which was a low number for the time.
However, Mary Ann’s father died in the Spring of 1857, when she was only fourteen. Her mother Mary, who had almost certainly been running the pub either alone or jointly with her husband since the family arrived in the town, then took over the license and ran it with the help of Mary Ann and her sister Emma – five-ish years older. A child working and being in the sight of alcohol being sold was not a problem at the time, as legislation banning under 14s in pubs appears not to have been brought in until the Licensing Act of 1964, and in any case did not apply to children residing at the premises (this was repealed in 1994 and removed at the beginning of 1995).
The pub was run as a going concern, with occasional overnight visitors. They offered a full service of ales and food, and accommodation for horses too – they employed an ostler on their staff, and had their own stables. Mary Ann’s brother George went on to be a commercial clerk, married and lived in Surrey, while the two girls stayed in business with their mother.
The pub, in common with other public houses and hotels at that time, was occasionally the venue for coroners’ inquests as it was a public area with enough space to accommodate many people. This included a 76-year-old sawyer who died of heart disease in 1870, a suicide in 1875, a two-year-old girl from measles complications in 1876, and a man who froze to death in a snowstorm in 1881.
Her mother ran the pub with Mary Ann and Emma for 15 years after her husband’s death, before dying herself at the age of 66. Directly after their mother’s death, both Mary Ann and Emma applied to jointly take over the license of the pub together.
They ran it together for a couple of years, until they both got married – on the same day, at Chippenham’s parish church. Emma’s beau was Charles, a school master who came from Reading, and she went off to live with him in that area and then South Wales. Mary Ann’s husband was Jeffrey, a farmer from nearby Langley Burrell. Accordingly, he took over the license of the pub from Mary Ann, and moved into the premises to nominally run it himself.
However, this marriage did not last long. Two years later Jeffrey was dead at the age of 40, and Mary Ann took over the pub license again. Given she had lived in the pub, and worked the business, since early childhood, this must very much have been business as usual – but running a pub alone, without any family, must have been a big ask. From accounts, the pub was not attached to any town brewery, so also brewed its own ale on the premises, of which Mary Ann would have had charge.
In 1880, she married a widower – Wright – who had lost his wife Emma at about two years before Jeffrey had died. He duly took over the pub licence from Mary Ann, who probably still ran the pub in actuality. Wright had been a farmer, and earlier than that had been a butler at Rodbourne House. His daughter Frances witnessed the marriage, as did Mary Ann’s brother George. With less people running the pub, however, they employed a barmaid and a servant as well as an ostler.
Her sister Emma had a baby in 1881, and Mary Ann went to visit her – Wright now working at the pub meant that she had the freedom to leave the business. There were no children from either of her marriages. Again though, this marriage was short-lived. This time, it was Mary Ann who died. Three years into the marriage, in 1883, she managed to catch her foot in the skirt of her dress and fell down the pub stairs, hitting her head. She complained of a headache later on, and lost a grip on reality, never recovering. She was discovered to have ruptured a blood vessel in her head when she fell. She was 39, which may seem no age now but by the standards of the time was getting on a bit. The local paper said:
“Although scarcely in the prime of life, Mrs. Clarke has perhaps been in the public business for a much longer period than any other landlady in the town, and her very amiable and obliging manners had won her many friends.”
She was buried in Chippenham. Wright sold up the business just over a year later, when it was described as “doing a very good trade, with a capital Market Dinner”. The death of Mary Ann had meant that Wright felt he could not continue running the pub. He went to live with his widowed sister in Norfolk, and died there in the early 1890s.
A school-marm has a particular historical resonance, and immediately conjures a vision of an older unmarried woman with a sour expression and a mortar board – but women of this tradition were often regarded as some of the very best and most beloved teachers, and this reputation could sometimes be traded upon to build an extensive career.
One of the very first Oxford female graduates, early 20th century teacher Aileen was regarded as “formidable” and taught at various British and American institutions, then went on to found her own British-style Catholic boarding school in the eastern United States – complete with British values, cold dormitories and chilblains.
She came from an Irish background – her father came from Waterford and her mother from Dublin – but her father’s employment as a railway clerk and then an accountant seems to indicate that their emigration to the London area was not directly from the labouring class in search of better work. Both parents arrived in Britain at some point before 1891, and while her father went straight into clerical work, her mother appears to have taught at a convent school in Edinburgh before they married.
Aileen was the middle child of five – two older brothers and one younger survived childhood, but her younger sister did not – and was born at the very tail end of the 19th century. With a family home in Woolwich, all the children were well educated. From the ages of nine to 18, Aileen was boarding at St Mary’s Priory, a Benedictine foundation at Princethorpe, near Rugby in Warwickshire. The building here now forms part of the modern Princethorpe school. The mother superior at the institution was French, while the nuns came from all over the globe – Ireland, Scotland, Italy, Germany, Jamaica, India, and even Mexico. Aileen was one of 41 students being educated here in 1911, in a large community of nuns, and it may be that becoming a nun was her original plan.
However, her obvious intelligence led to further study. She joined the University of Oxford Society of Home Students in 1917 to further her studies. Although women were allowed to study at the university, due to their gender they were not allowed to be admitted to the university – in other words be given their degree – until 1921. Trinity College Dublin, which – as the whole of Ireland was part of the UK until this era – was considered on a par with Oxford and Cambridge admitted women to their degrees from 1904, but Cambridge did not follow suit until 1947. Aileen was housed at St Frideswide’s, a large hostel at Cherwell Edge, run by the Society of the Holy Child of Jesus along with many other young Catholic women. Aileen would have gone to Oxford expecting to just follow a course of lectures, but reforms in 1920 meant that she would qualify for her degree in English Language and Literature and be given it – and she received it, one of the first women to do so, in 1921. The Society of Home Students became St Anne’s College at Oxford in 1942.
As one of the first Oxford women graduates, this status opened doors for Aileen. While one of her older brothers went to work in China in 1919, having served in the navy in the First World War, was awarded Master of Foreign-Going Steamships in 1923, she got her first teaching job at Hays School, at Shaftesbury in Wiltshire, in 1921. After this, Aileen took up a teaching position in the United States and relocated there in 1923.
Arriving in New York in early autumn of that year, she became part of the staff of Marymount College in Tarrytown, located up the Hudson River about 25 miles north of the main city. This was founded as a boarding school by Mother Marie Joseph Butler in 1907, and educated Catholic girls. Aileen was 25, unmarried – as was required for a female teacher at that time – and her well-educated convent background would have been seen as an asset to the school. She remained at Marymount until the summer of 1925, when she returned home.
She arrived back in America the following autumn, and took up a teaching position at Foxcroft School in Virginia. This prestigious boarding and day school educated girls from well-connected families, and took pupils from the ages of around 13 to 18, preparing them for college. Aileen worked alongside founding headteacher Charlotte Haxall Noland, and the school famously educated Wallis Simpson.
She appears to have come home every summer, but in 1928 she stayed in the UK rather than heading back to America. She gained a position at the County School, a grammar school a world away from the boarding schools she’d previously worked in, in the Wiltshire town of Bradford on Avon. This school, where she taught English to 11-18 year olds, had many more male teachers than she would previously have worked with, and rather than being an exclusive boarding school for those who could afford it instead educated those children of the town who had passed an exam for entrance. The school later became Fitzmaurice Grammar School.
However, it seems this position did not suit her well. She wrote a letter of resignation in June 1929, saying that she had been offered another very good position in the United States, and “owing to family reasons I do not feel justified in refusing”. Exactly what her family situation was at this time is open to suggestion – both older brothers were happily settled in professions, her younger brother was also working as a school teacher, and her parents both appear healthy – but leave she did.
Exactly what the teaching position Aileen was offered in the US to tempt her back is unclear. The founder of Marymount College had founded a connected girls day school in Manhattan in 1926, so it is possible that a job here was offered, but it equally could have been any other school in the eastern US.
In 1930, with around ten years of teaching behind her, she established her own boarding school in the US. Foxhollow School was founded at Rhinebeck in Dutchess County in New York State, another part of the Hudson River Valley, but north of Tarrytown. The house she acquired had previously belonged to Tracy Dows, the son of a successful Manhattan grain merchant, who had commissioned the building in 1910 from architect Harrie T Lindeberg. The family had fallen on hard times during the Wall Street Crash, and Aileen was able to purchase the estate for her school.
Foxhollow School was a college preparatory school, so catered for girls in the final four years of American schooling. Aileen was known as a proper Brit, with values, accent and manners to match – which probably helped cement the exclusive and top-quality nature that went with the reputation of British-style boarding schools.
British schools, especially private (also called “public”) schools with boarding facilities, have always held an enviable international reputation as the best places to educate children. Elite families around the globe, especially those from countries in the former British empire, would package up their children on a ship and send them to school with a tuck box, and only see them again during the holidays. As did many British parents too. For (literary) examples of this phenomena see books by Angela Brazil, Charles Hamilton, or Enid Blyton.
A by-product of the esteem these schools were held in was that teachers associated with the British grammar and public school tradition could usually find themselves held in high renown if they took a position in a foreign school, and even values that we would today frown upon could be upheld if they came from the British Boarding School tradition. For example, Aileen’s pupils apparently complained of chilblains from the coldness of their dormitories, but were told that this was to be expected of a school of this character, and to buck up and suffer in silence as girls had done for decades previously.
When the first Jewish refugees from the Nazis started to arrive in the US in 1933, Aileen felt it was her moral duty to help them. She offered refugees temporary jobs at her school until they could find something better. She reportedly despised Nazis.
In 1939 Aileen chose to move her school from New York state to Massachusetts, but kept the original name – so Foxhollow School was resident at Holmwood, the former estate of the Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt family in Lennox. This was a much bigger property, with 47 rooms, so shows that the school was doing well and expanding. Vandebilt, who had died on the Lusitania in 1915, never actually lived in the house. His widow, Margaret, had bought it after his death, had it remodelled, and had lived there with two subsequent husbands.
As the school had continued to expand, Aileen looked at other nearby properties to take over, particularly as some of the classrooms and a stable suffered some fire damage in late 1941. Adjoining Holmwood was The Mount, which had originally belonged to writer Edith Wharton, which Aileen was able to buy for a reasonable price, and boarded girls in their junior and senior years of the high school system in the servants’ sleeping quarters in the attic and the first floor bedrooms. A chemistry lab was established in The Mount’s kitchen, and four older girls shared the room that had previously been Wharton’s bedroom – even with her original decorated panels in situ. On Sundays, senior girls were allowed to sit and read quietly in what had been Wharton’s private library.
The school also had extensive stables, based in the original buildings at The Mount estate. Riding was seen as an important part of school life at Foxhollow.
Aileen herself has been described as “formidable”, “charmingly British”, “strict and proper” and a “grande dame”. She was an established presence in local town life, and – despite living in America for most of her life – never gave up her British citizenship. She had a limousine and a chauffeur, and would send them to the airport to pick up visitors – including her younger brother when he came over to visit her.
The school girls were allowed to have dances with neighbouring boys’ schools, to socialise the pupils and teach them how dance. At one of these Aileen is supposed to have leaned over to a male chaperone from The Berkshire School, and asked him “can you tell me, is the word “fuck” still in common usage?”.
The school gradually lost a number of pupils as the image of British boarding school education faded, and eventually closed in 1976. Aileen had retired as headteacher in 1970, and had placed the school buildings on the National Register of Historic Places. The original Holmwood building was then used as an inn, and has now been converted into apartments. The Mount has been restored to the glory days of Edith Wharton’s era, and is now a visitor centre dedicated to her life and work.
Aileen had never married. Neither had two of her brothers. One brother did, but there do not appear to have been any children. She continued to live in Lenox, Massachusetts, until her death in 1981 in her early 80s. She left no survivors, but a considerable legacy.
