Edith C’s story

Edith led a varied life as a prominent anti-suffragist, a mathematics book author, and the wife of a renowned British composer. In addition, she was a mother, and had a foreign upbringing.

India-born Edith was the daughter of a British engineer, who had been posted to the British Raj hillpost of Mussoorie – in the northern part of the country – in the early 1860s. He was employed by the East Indian Railway, and travelled around the country working and advising on the early establishment of track and engines, and Edith’s mother therefore gave birth to her children in various different places – including Mayapore and Allahabad – and then the more conventional Kent and London.

Edith spent her early childhood in the heat of India, and then returned to London for a while. Her father was posted back to India, so she and her siblings went to live in Hove – at the British seaside – with their mother. Her eldest sister married back in India in the mid-1870s, so it’s probable that the whole family returned to India for a time during that decade, and there is absolutely no sign of Edith and her siblings on the 1881 census so it’s probable that they remained there for several years.

By 1885 one of her brothers was admitted to Cambridge from Bromley, so the whole family had returned to the UK for good, and it was from Bromley that she married in 1890. Her husband was employed at the Royal School of Music in London, and from this point onwards Edith became outwardly known by his name.

They moved into Kensington, the fashionable part of London, and over the next few years Edith gave birth to four children – two girls, and then twin boys. They had a full complement of servants – including a nurse and nursery maids – to give them a very comfortable life.

In 1906 Edith published a book on rhythm in mathematics, perhaps taking on some background from the musical atmosphere in her home. The idea, which originated with Mary Everest Boole, was that children should be taught musical rhythmic patterns in mathematics first, before moving on to more intellectual concepts. The book came with a set of punched sewing cards that enabled children to create curves and designs that encouraged patterns and harmony. Edith’s introduction to the work said of the idea:

“Beautiful curves are produced by a process so simple and automatic that the most inartistic child can succeed in generating beauty by mere conscientious accuracy; and the habit of doing this tends to produce a keen feeling for line. It has also been noticed in 649 some cases, where clean, pure, and strong colour has been used, that a remarkable sensitiveness to colour relation has grown.

“The results obtained by a child, of exquisite curved and flower forms on the ‘back’ of his card, by faithful obedience to a dull little rule in making straight stitches on the ‘front’, is of the nature a miracle. It should, therefore, be hardly necessary to insist that the less said the better, when the little worker produces anything especially beautiful or unexpected.”

The book was still being reprinted, with no real modernisation, until the mid-1970s.

The next phase of Edith’s life began as the campaign for women’s suffrage began to escalate. She opposed women’s suffrage, and was involved in the early days of the Women’s National Anti-suffrage League. She attended a meeting hosted by the Countess of Jersey in London in November 1908, and by the spring of 1909 she was honourable secretary of the league. In this role she spoke at West Hampstead Town Hall:

“… the Suffragists made the mistake of being unduly influenced by special instances rather than considering the community as a whole. The statement that women paid for the vote and therefore they ought to have it was, she thought a very mean conception of citizenship. It had never been our principle in this country. There were two classes of qualification for the vote. The first was that the voter should be a man, and, secondly, he should give some good ground for believing that he would take a permanent and stable interest in the good government of the country. The cry of the Suffragists for the vote on the same terms as men was absurd, because the first term on which men were given the vote was that they were men. (She) then spoke briefly on the subject of the vastness of our Empire, and stated that in all the Suffragist literature there was none upon the subject of women’s franchise and the Empire. Suffragists proposed to alter the whole Constitution upon which that great Empire had been built up without showing its effects upon the Empire. She also referred briefly to certain Suffragist literature, the under-trend of which, she said, seemed to be the destruction of the thought of motherhood as the highest ideal for women.”

She continued to be very involved in the work of the league, proving to be a well-known and rousing speaker for their ideals, and – like her rising counterpart Gwladys – believing that women had an important role in improving society by breeding and raising better people rather than influencing politics. Her platform was presented at various meetings around the country, often working with and speaking alongside with Mary Ward, better known as Mrs Humphry Ward, including at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in late October 1909:

“… (she) said Miss Robertson (Margaret Robinson, one of the speakers for the cause of women’s suffrage) made some good debating points without upsetting Mrs Ward’s argument. “We say (she said) that government depends on the consent of the majority, and that is one of the reasons we oppose the extension of the franchise”. Nobody seemed to know what she meant, and she passed on to consider Miss Robertson’s higher view of motherhood. Miss Robertson said this high ideal was only to be attained through the vote. But it is, and always has been, attained by making better men.

“Women are always in the foreground of reforms, not that men are more evil, but because women have the whole future of the world in their hands. Reforms have been won by women influencing the good men to help. She appealed to all the women to do the work which men have given them to do, and wait till they were invited to take their place in the foreground.”

She also toured Scotland for her cause, speaking at meetings of her league and also being present at a meeting in Edinburgh where Christabel Pankhurst was speaking for the cause of women’s suffrage, and proved to be a vociferous opposer and no shrinking violet:

“In the course of her address, Miss Pankhurst was interrupted by a lady, and she said if the interrupter had been at a Liberal meeting she would have been thrown out. The lady, who afterwards gave her name as (Edith), of the Anti-Suffrage League, said she was interrupting a meeting which had to do with women’s suffrage. Miss Pankhurst and her friends interrupted meetings where Cabinet Ministers talked about something else.

“Miss Pankhurst retorted that a Cabinet Minister could not talk on any political question which was not connected with votes for women. Miss Pankhurst was severely “heckled” for about half an hour. (Edith) was prominent at this part of the proceedings, and for some time she sustained a vigorous argument with Miss Pankhurst. (Edith) challenged directly a statement made by Miss Pankhurst as to the remuneration directly a statement made by Miss Pankhurst as to the remuneration of women engaged in the textile industries, and gave as her authority the Board of Trade Blue-book on the subject, which she advised the audience to read. (Edith), in reply to Miss Pankhurst’s declaration that taxation without representation was tyranny, pointed out that citizenship was not a matter of paying money; and Miss Pankhurst replied that men had laid down that taxation and representation must go together. (Edith) then asked, if that was so, why only 6 ½ millions of the men who paid taxes had the vote? Miss Pankhurst said it was not their business to complain of the way men worked out the general principle they had laid down. They wanted for women the principle men had set up for themselves.”

However, despite the prominence of her role in the Women’s National Anti-suffrage League, whether she found the work incompatible with her family life, or changed her views, Edith stood down as secretary at the beginning of 1910. She made one more appearance on an anti-suffrage platform, and then disappeared from view.

Interestingly, however, she appears on the first electoral role that she could appear on, in 1918. This may indicate that she had changed her views, but there is no way of knowing whether she actually did vote or not.

She and her husband, once their children had grown and left home, appear to have lived quietly supported by domestic staff in their fairly grand townhouse in Kensington. They gradually downsized their properties as their needs grew less. Her husband was knighted for his work in music in 1929, and Edith became a Lady.

She was widowed a couple of years before the Second World War, and again downsized, living with a parlour maid and a cook/housekeeper until her own death at the tail end of the war.

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The Women Who Made Me actively welcomes submissions from anyone who has a story to tell about women from their family. To submit a woman from your family for inclusion in The Women Who Made Me project, contact Lucy of Once Upon A Family Tree. If you don’t think you have anyone, she begs to differ and can help you discover your female relatives’ lives.

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Ida H’s story

A campaigner and activist for women’s education, and later a playwright and author, Ida H’s roots were very much in her beloved Wiltshire.

Born in the mid-1880s, she grew up in a village in the middle of the county, just outside Devizes, as one of seven children (including a set of twins) of the village vicar and his rather-unconventional wife. The fact that she was a vicar’s daughter means that her exact time of birth is recorded alongside her baptism. She later recounted tales of her not-particularly straight-laced Victorian childhood in a memoir. One of these involved the whole tribe of her siblings regularly running about the village bare-footed and exacting the ridicule of some passing gypsies. The gypsies’ reaction incensed their nurse so much that she insisted all the children return home and put on their Sunday best stockings and shoes, to be paraded in front of the travelling folk. However, when the children returned the gypsies had retreated to their tents for the night and the nurse’s efforts were in vain.

Her mother was a writer, and appeared to have not too much care for the strict conventions of the day, leaving Ida and her siblings to roam the area as a gang – swimming in the canal, climbing the church roof, and wandering all over the local Wiltshire downlands. Ida and one of her younger sisters even went on a riding tour alone for three days, spending one night sleeping in a barn. Their household appears comfortable, with a whole complement of domestic staff to help the family, which would mean her mother had more time to write instead of child-rearing.

She was also a keen archer, taking part in mixed doubles matches for the Wiltshire Society of Archers when she was around 20.

When Ida was in her early 20s and still living at home, her father’s position moved to another village in Wiltshire, closer to Swindon. It was here that she became involved in the work of the Workers’ Educational Association, which was initially set up in London in the early 1900s but had enthusiastically been taken up in Swindon by local politician and county councillor Reuben George. The organisation worked to further education and bring new skills to the whole population, with focus on the working class, as part of a drive at this time to improve and progress society.

Ida, in the face of considerable opposition from the locals, set up the first village branch of the WEA in her home village. This endeavour was supported by Reuben George. This was a step towards her lifelong drive towards social reform, and was followed by another – a move to London to undertake social work. Indeed, on the 1911 census she was in London, lodging with a female tutor in sociology and called herself a social worker – a fairly unusual choice of a career for a woman of her background. At home her branch of the WEA flourished, and she was appointed just the second WEA women’s officer in 1912, at the age of 27.

This put her in a position of improving the lives of women when the women’s suffrage campaign was at its height. In 1913 she wrote:

“If the WEA is to gain any substantial victory in its campaign against ignorance and injustice, men and women must be fighting side by side. Their cause, their interests are inseparably bound together. Neither party can march by itself without endangering both its own safety, and that of the party it has left, and if one ceases to make progress, the other is held back too; so, of all the special efforts the WEA has to make today, perhaps none is more important than the special effort it is making on behalf of women.”

This job took her to speak about women’s education at meetings and gatherings all over the country, and it was at one position – in Oxfordshire about three years later – that she met and fell in love with the community doctor. As married women did not have jobs, she resigned her post with the WEA and did not even acknowledge her working life on her wedding certificate, when they married in the middle of the First World War.

As a doctor, her husband was in a reserved occupation and therefore excused conscription – so did not go to war. Ida gave birth to two sons in quick succession in the years that followed, and settled into life as a doctor’s wife in Oxfordshire.

It was as part of this life that Ida, who had been a compulsive writer since childhood, began to write in earnest. As her children grew, she started as a playwright in the 1920s, penning several works for children before working on dramas and comedies for adult groups. At the tail end of the 1920s she gave birth to her third child – a daughter – nearly ten years after her second son. She continued to write plays, sometimes directing them or producing them with amateur and semi-professional companies, and several were broadcast by the BBC on the home service in the early days of radio. One, a comedy called Lardy Cake, referred to a popular Wiltshire baked product, and others made reference to occurrences in her Wiltshire childhood. She also started writing books, among them an account of her Wiltshire childhood.

The family moved to Shropshire in 1930, where Ida’s plays continued to be written and performed by the village players, and her two sons went to study at university while her daughter went to boarding school. She also wrote and broadcast about Shropshire life, and during World War Two was very active in the local WI. Writing took a bit of a back seat for Ida at this time.

Her husband retired at the end of World War Two, and they moved to Dorset – but Ida was widowed about three years later. She began to travel the world, as her family had spread out and her eldest son was now working as a diplomat and was posted to far flung places.

She moved back to Wiltshire, and settled in Aldbourne, returning to writing. In the early 60s she researched and published a book on the village she grew up in, which was followed by a book detailing holidays with her five spinster aunts in the New Forest. She then wrote a book on Shropshire, and finally an intricately researched history of Aldbourne. She was at the heart of village life until she died in the late 1970s, and was buried in Aldbourne churchyard.

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The Women Who Made Me actively welcomes submissions from anyone who has a story to tell about women from their family. To submit a woman from your family for inclusion in The Women Who Made Me project, contact Lucy of Once Upon A Family Tree. If you don’t think you have anyone, she begs to differ and can help you discover your female relatives’ lives.

Olive P’s story

In the seventh of our grandmother pieces, Sharon’s granny was adopted, a feminist and served in World War II.

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My Grandma, Olive was born (as the family story goes) as the result of an affair that her Dad had. Her birth mother had no interest in raising her so my her Dad and his wife adopted her (though there were no official adoption records) when she was six weeks old in 1921.

My Grandma was now the youngest of three girls. Her parents doted on her and raised her as their own, so much so that she didn’t realise that she was adopted until she needed to get her birth cert when she was 18. On finding out she arranged a deed poll and officially changed her name to that of the family who had raised her.

Her father was very much a feminist. He was a staunch Labour supporter. He was a coal miner and very much involved in workers rights.

This attitude also went towards how he raised his three girls. He told them to never let a man support them, to always have their own independence. He pushed education as vital to them.

So, during WWII my grandmother enlisted straight away in the ATS, she served a few roles, she was a nurse for a while in 1940 but one of the things she was most proud of was manning the radar machines for the anti-aircraft guns. She would tell me how her boss didn’t have great eyesight and would tell them to wait until they could see the whites of their eyes before firing.

Anyway, after the war she married my granddad, he was in the Navy and wanted to stay in the Navy but his father was a miner and the mining company owned his house and said that he would be removed unless my granddad came back to work for the company. So he did.

They had five children like steps of stairs and as soon as the baby was old enough to go to school my Grandma went back to college and then began working as a teacher (she was one of the first special needs teachers in Yorkshire).

All the neighbours were belittling my Granddad for letting his wife work. Then came the mining strikes and all of those neighbours and my Granddad lost their jobs but my Grandma could afford to keep her house and help her neighbours too.

When she was in her eighties she lost her sight but that didn’t stop her, she started listening to audio books and taught herself braille.

She was hilarious too, when I brought my then girlfriend (now wife) to meet her for the first time a few years before she died, she said to her “You can be having affairs all over the place, I will keep one eye open and one ear closed, as long as you are happy that’s all that matters”

She passed away in 2013 and she wanted “If I ruled the world” played at her funeral and we played it for her.

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The Women Who Made Me actively welcomes submissions from anyone who has a story to tell about women from their family. To submit a woman from your family for inclusion in The Women Who Made Me project, contact Lucy of Once Upon A Family Tree. If you don’t think you have anyone, she begs to differ and can help you discover your female relatives’ lives.

Troy’s story

In the sixth of our grandmother pieces, Marina’s Romanian granny was officially a war widow, but the political situation meant she was always waiting for her husband to return.

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My grandmother Dumitra (known throughout her life by her nickname Troy) was born in 1913 in a small village in the hilly sub-Carpathian region of Romania, in a fertile valley full of orchards. The area is particularly well-known for its plums, with many different varieties, some used to produce the local brandy.

Mamaie Troy (mamaie is an affection term for grandmother in Romanian, rather like Nana in English) was a bit of a tomboy, the youngest in a family of mainly boys. Not only was she a daredevil, riding horses bareback, walking through the forest by herself, but she was also very bright. She only went to school for a few years, her father didn’t have the money or the conviction for education for girls, but she was able to read and write and enjoyed reading throughout her life. This was by no means common for women of her generation who grew up in the countryside. My grandmother on my father’s side, for instance, was illiterate and had to have the letters from my father read out to her by the village priest.

Troy married in the late 1930s, when she was 25-26, quite late for the standards of the time. (Perhaps her tomboyish nature put men off? That, and the lack of dowry.) She married the village shoemaker and had, in quick succession, two sons and a daughter (my mother). The second son died as an infant, but we only know him from a picture, she never talked about him.

Unfortunately, the war came and Romania was originally allied to the Germans. My grandfather got sent to the Russian front in 1940. He did come back at least once, as my mother vaguely remembers him making a pair of red shoes for her when she was about 2, and how proud she was of them. She was the only girl in the village who had shoes at the time.

Then the military dictatorship was replaced and Romania switched allegiance in 1944, but my grandfather never returned. He was officially missing in action, although soldiers who later returned from the war to the village said he had been taken to a Siberian labour camp during the period when the Romanians were fighting the Soviets.

Mamaie Troy waited for him all her life. She didn’t believe he was dead and thought that he might be released one day. Indeed, after Stalin’s death, in the 1950s, some POWs were released, but not him.

Although she was officially a war widow, her husband had died on the ‘wrong front’, and after Romania became Communist in 1947, she was never given any widow’s pension. She tried to keep the farm going single-handedly, with two small children to feed and clothe, but the land was forcibly nationalised and she had to work on the state farms instead.

She was left with just a small patch of land, enough for 3-4 sheep, a pig, chicken, a goat or two and a cow, a tiny orchard and a vegetable patch. She looked after all of these on top of a full day’s work at the state farm, and while looking after the two children.

She spoilt her animals rotten – I remember the pig would follow her everywhere like a dog, even resting at her feet when she was sewing or knitting. Yet she had no qualms whatsoever about slaughtering him for Christmas (traditionally, we have fresh pork for Christmas in Romania).

She had her share of marriage proposals, but she never wanted to bring in a ‘strange man’ into the house, to mistreat her children, potentially. Or so she said. Perhaps she was still hoping for my grandfather to return. Or maybe she’d had enough of men telling her what she could or couldn’t do.

The son (my uncle) was a bit of a troublemaker, so she was constantly having to sort him out, but my mother inherited Troy’s brains and was sent off to secondary school in a neighbouring town. (One good thing about Communism: education was free, and she was given a merit scholarship for her accommodation and food.) But that did mean that Mamaie Troy was left alone from the mid-1950s to tend to her land.

She never complained and never wanted to move to the city, even after my mother went to university, married a diplomat and lived abroad for a while and offered to take her in.

However, she did once visit us in Vienna, where we were living at the time, and struck up friendships with the elderly Austrian caretaker of our block of flats, although neither of them could speak each other’s language. She also learnt a lot about agriculture and vineyards in the area surrounding the Vienna woods – she was always open and curious about other cultures.

I spent many a happy summer at her house with my cousins. She made us work hard – the animals needed to be looked after, we had to bring buckets of water from the well which was 200 metres down the path from the house – but there were still moments when we could go wandering through the forest, eat fruit directly from the trees and read books in the summer breeze.

I distinctly remember reading Anna Karenina up in the cherry tree, stopping every now and then to pick some cherries and coming down with a stained mouth and T shirt. The conditions were primitive – the toilet was in the outhouse, there was no electricity or running water, but Mamaie Troy was very house-proud and was endlessly sweeping and tidying.

Alas, as she grew older, her eyesight started failing (glaucoma) and her limbs stiffening and she was no longer able to keep things clean. It was difficult to convince her to allow us to do a thorough clean though, so we started avoiding eating in her house.

She didn’t want to leave the countryside until she was bedridden. Then she had to move to Bucharest into my parents’ flat and allow herself to be looked after by my mother. It was very hard on them both.

My grandmother couldn’t read anymore, couldn’t even go to the toilet by herself without help, all she could do was lie in bed and listen to the radio. After a while, her hearing got worse as well, so all she wanted to do was talk, but my mother was not able to sit with her all day to listen. Her mind was sharp right until the end and she hated herself being so helpless. She would complain that ‘God had forgotten her on this earth.’

She was always radiant when she saw me, however, and worried about how I was settling in when I went to the UK to study. ‘Isn’t the weather horrible there, my love? Are they treating you well?’

She was the one who consoled my mother when I decided not to return to Romania after completing my studies. ‘She’s got to make her own way in life, she’s not going to hang around for us.’

She was so modern and indomitable in spirit, so ahead of her time. We had a very special bond and I was happy that she lived long enough to know that her great-grandchild was going to be born soon.

Grandmother Troy

Goats bring sticks to the porch.

Her hair harbours leaves.

Brother Pig snouts at the damp patch

beneath the hearth

where she – once more –  spilled the ciorba,

bread chunks softened for three remaining teeth.

She warms her swollen knuckles

against the earthen pot:

all she can hear are the mild-greedy snuffles

of her companion sheep.

Soot caresses the damp wool

of jumpers hung to dry.

Grey hair in its plait, she doesn’t care

if mulberries stain her thumbs or clothes,

fingers in knots, eyes milky clouds,

she no longer mops the muck she cannot see.

Go for a visit: she can still slash her way

through nonsense with a crackle of joints.

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The Women Who Made Me actively welcomes submissions from anyone who has a story to tell about women from their family. To submit a woman from your family for inclusion in The Women Who Made Me project, contact Lucy of Once Upon A Family Tree. If you don’t think you have anyone, she begs to differ and can help you discover your female relatives’ lives.

Helen and Grace B’s story

Sisters Helen and Grace B, the eldest and second youngest of five girls, were both involved in women’s suffrage, and both teachers – and therefore it is difficult, since both were unmarried and known as Miss B, to separate their activities.

They came from a moneyed family that moved around as their iron master father’s business dictated – Helen was born in Staffordshire in the early 1860s while Grace’s birth occurred in Yorkshire later in that decade, and their sisters were born in places in between. The family also spent time in Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, and London. As could be expected from an employer of 300 men, the sisters were brought up in big houses with full complements of servants and educated by governesses.

Both went on to be school teachers – Helen first, as she was the elder, in the early 1880s when she was in her early 20s, and Grace followed in her footsteps in the 1890s. Their other two unmarried sisters remained with their parents, while the youngest married a reverend.

Both Helen and Grace held long positions at prestigious private girls’ schools. Helen taught in Worcester at the Alice Ottley School for over 18 years, while Grace – after a start as a science and biology teacher in Berkshire – had a position at The Godolphin School in Salisbury for 21. Each of them were form tutors, taking older girls, and both held the second in command position – effectively the deputy head – in her school. Grace’s subject was history, but she also was involved in “contemporary studies”, which appears to have been reading the newspapers aloud and discussing their content while darning and mending, and played the double bass in the school orchestra.

Midway through the first decade of the 20^th century, however, Helen chose to leave her job in England and took a job at a newly established school in New Zealand. The idea was that she would bring her experience and her school’s values to this new school. The journey, which went via Australia, would have taken weeks at sea at this time, and she travelled as a missionary. It’s known, from shipping records, that she made this journey at least twice over the next few years.

This position in New Zealand may have been the catalyst for Helen’s involvement in women’s suffrage, although by her very background – she was of wealthy background, unmarried, and very educated – she was ripe to take on the fight even before she left the UK. Women in New Zealand gained the vote in 1893, with various states in Australia also granting it around the time Helen went over, and she would have been there to see the political and social gains that were made by newly enfranchised women.

Helen returned to the UK in 1912, after the death of their father, and appears to have based herself in Salisbury, near where Grace was teaching, although her unmarried and unemployed sisters were now based around Bristol and Bath. Although she does not appear on any available records to have been a member of staff at Grace’s school, Helen appears to have been taken on to the staff at some point or at least deeply involved in the life of the establishment – as were all the family. Their reverend brother-in-law gave religious addresses to the girls of Godolphin School, and their middle sister was responsible for some of the wood carving in the school hall.

While Grace was the deputy head, it was Helen who gave the address to Godolphin School on Empire Day in May 1916, mentioning the war effort and pride in their country.

It is known that the headteacher of Godolphin School at the time, Mary Alice Douglas, was a suffrage sympathiser. However, it appears that it was Helen – possibly with Grace – who was directly involved in the fight to gain women the vote. Salisbury had a NUWSS society from 1909, which was joined in 1913 by a South Wiltshire branch. By June 1914 Helen was the chairman of the Salisbury WSS, and was writing to correct claims made by anti-suffragists from that position in The Common Cause. Her refutations were backed up with statistics from Australia, which indicate that she was well versed in her subject.

Grace left teaching at Christmas 1916, feeling that her own home needed her. Presumably her two unmarried sisters, who had been supported by their parents while they had been alive, were part of that household. Either Helen or Grace was still in Salisbury for a while afterwards, as a Miss B lent her garden for school play performances in the summer of 1917.

Women in the UK gained the vote in 1918, and by this stage one of the Miss Bs – probably Helen – was chair of the Salisbury and South Wilts Women’s Suffrage Society. As the general election was announced at the end of that year, she chaired a meeting of the society supported by Alys Russell, where they read out answers on women’s political issues that the society had put to both candidates. Miss B also spoke:

“(She) commented on the approaching election, and said that women were privileged to help to put into power men, and, she hoped with all her heart, some women who had to undertake the largest and heaviest task ever laid upon statesmen since the world began. The task before the Parliament and the Government was to make a peace which would endure, to end war for ever by a League of Nations that would last, and, secondly, to build up a new England, and make it, as Mr Lloyd George said last week, “A country fit for heroes to live in, and for their wives and children to live in.” Having made the world, by this victory, safe for democracy, they now had to make democracy safe from selfishness and pride. The old political weapons completely failed to accomplish either of these tasks – they failed to keep the peace of the world, and failed to build up an England that they could live in. New forces were needed. Could women bring into the electorate a new spirit instead of the party spirit – a spirit of unity, without suspicion, spite, slander and the imputing of evil motives to these who did not think exactly as they did, but crediting those from whom they differed with common honesty and with really holding the opinions they professed? Could women not also, as was being done in other countries, help to make politics a clean thing, and selling of votes which often meant the selling of souls. Let them stand for clean hands.”

The gaining of the vote for women saw the gradual disbandment of Women’s Suffrage Societies, although true equality was pushed for until it was granted in 1928. Helen appears to have stayed in Salisbury, and contributed to the bicentenary book on the Godolphin School in 1926.

Both Helen and Grace retired to a house near Bath, with their unmarried sisters – who were given the roles of cook and gardener – and lived out their last years in a quiet village. Both died in the 1950s – Grace first, at 84, and Helen two years later at 94. They both left decent sums of money to their remaining sisters.

 

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The Women Who Made Me actively welcomes submissions from anyone who has a story to tell about women from their family. To submit a woman from your family for inclusion in The Women Who Made Me project, contact Lucy of Once Upon A Family Tree. If you don’t think you have anyone, she begs to differ and can help you discover your female relatives’ lives.

Priscilla P’s story

Much was made of Priscilla’s husband’s ability to father a cricket team, with newspapers describing his eleven sons as fine, healthy, energetic young men. However, what is never mentioned is that it was Priscilla who had to carry and give birth to each of them – and their three sisters too – and she spent 10 and a half years of her life pregnant.

She grew up in the 1820s in the London and Home Counties areas, the daughter of an excise officer – a relatively stable position, and one that would have led to a comfortable but not overly wealthy lifestyle for his family. She was one of the younger children in the family. There were at least four sisters, and three brothers who all went on to undertake skilled trades.

At 20 she married an excavator who had come from “humble beginnings” and was on the rise in the railway business under Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Three children, two boys and a girl, followed quickly afterwards, and the family moved to Wiltshire where her husband was employed as a contractor in the Great Western Railway.

Over the next sixteen years, Priscilla gave birth to another ten children – nine boys, one girl, at a rate of about one every two years – which meant that she exceeded Queen Victoria’s output of the same period. At this time it was considered to be a way of being a good woman in the eyes of God to breed and bring up as many children as possible, and this was believed to be a woman’s priority in life. Another reason for having a large family is that often a couple of the children would not survive until adulthood – but all of Priscilla’s did, which perhaps gave rise to the fuss made over her husband’s cricket team of fine healthy sons, as this proved his strong breeding stock. The fact that it was Priscilla who had actually done the hard work in carrying all these children to term, giving birth to them, and breastfeeding them until they weaned (bottle feeding wasn’t necessarily an option for her earliest children, since the earliest bottles started to be developed in the 1850s, and wet-nurses were only employed by royalty/nobility or in cases where the mother had died) appears not to have mattered a jot.

Her husband’s memoirs refer to them having done their duty to Queen and Country by having so many children, and further say:

“And I must here say that if I had not been blessed with one of the very best of wives I never could have gone through all I have nor carried out the works I have done without her help. She acted as my cashier, throughout nearly all the works, sometimes drawing the money from the Banks, and collecting silver from other sources, and often had to sit up until midnight, counting and tying up many hundreds of pounds in small bags for me to throw out of the trains to the gangs on the maintenance and other works along the line. This she continued to do until the family got too large and the works so increased, when her brother came down and took it out of her hands.

And I am bound to say that if there was any credit due in carrying out work or bringing up our family, the greater share belonged to my devoted WIFE.”

In modern times, anyone handling the money and books in this way would at very least have been credited as having the job of a cashier, if not a book keeper or even an accountant. But because Priscilla was a woman and his wife, her job and skills here are not credited and by the standards of the day she was expected to do this as a wife of a businessman.

Her husband’s eventual obituary described her as “an admirable woman … a thorough helpmeet to him in life, and who had considerable share of her husband’s force of character”, which indicates she epitomised all was thought good about Victorian womanhood. She clearly ran their household, located next to the railway in Chippenham, Wiltshire, and brought up her children in the manner that was expected of a woman of her station in life – an upper middle-class family with aspirations and a fair amount of money. The boys were educated at a boarding school in the next town over once they’d reached nine years old, and were encouraged to follow in their father’s footsteps, while the girls were also educated in a smaller village establishment run by an ex-governess. Until the age of nine the boys all remained at home and were under Priscilla’s care. Her house was grand for the town, with a large garden, and a newspaper of the time reports a large party was held there when an external new drawing room was added to the property. Her younger brother also lived with the family for a time, taking on the book keeping work that had previously been Priscilla’s.

Religiously, the family were non-conformists, attending Chippenham’s Tabernacle chapel as members of the congregation.

Priscilla’s family were well known in the town – her sons and her husband formed a cricket team who took on the town club and other prominent families and businesses, and built houses and other philanthropic projects. Her position in the town would have been at the top of the women’s social ladder locally, and it’s likely her daily life was full of social engagements. She had domestic staff to help her run her house.

This all changed when her husband’s business faltered in the mid-1860s. His engineering and iron works lost a considerable amount of money. The grand house was sold, and the lifestyle disappeared. However, the family moved to South Wales and took up residence in a smaller but still sizeable property in the centre of Cardiff. Here in the 1870s Priscilla was housekeeper and brought up her younger children while her husband was employed as general manager of an ironworks. This was a step down from the prestige of a big business owner, but probably more financially stable for his family. Their reduced circumstances are reflected in the fact that they did not employ any domestic servants at this time, and Priscilla herself kept the house going alone.

After a few years here, their finances were on better terms so the family moved to a larger property in the fashionable Clifton area of Bristol. Their second son took on the mantle of the family profession, while Priscilla and her husband – whose health had deteriorated – enjoyed a retirement with their second daughter – who never married – and occasionally other children. She was widowed in the early part of the 1880s, and spent her remaining years as matriarch and grandmother to her increasing family. She died in the later 1880s, and is buried alongside her husband in Bristol’s picturesque Arnos Vale cemetery.

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The Women Who Made Me actively welcomes submissions from anyone who has a story to tell about women from their family. To submit a woman from your family for inclusion in The Women Who Made Me project, contact Lucy of Once Upon A Family Tree. If you don’t think you have anyone, she begs to differ and can help you discover your female relatives’ lives.

Ede H’s story

In the fifth of our grandmother pieces, Deborah’s granny fell hard for her friend’s boyfriend, and ended up marrying him.

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My grandmother, Edith Edna (Ede) would have been 100 years old this week. She was born on 11^th May 1918, in Shepherds Bush, London, the youngest of 10 children.

She married George in 1942 and died far too early in 1986.

She never spoke much about her parents or her early years, so recently, out of curiosity, I began to research her family and early life: She was born into poverty. Her mother married her father in 1895 when she was only 16, although they lied about her age on the marriage certificate (it contradicts her birth certificate). Her father was a general labourer and he was only 18 when they wed. Their first child (Ede’s eldest sister) was born just 3 weeks after the wedding, so I think we get an idea what sort of marriage it was.

The street in Shepherds Bush where the family lived in a crowded tenement was classified by Charles Booth (in his poverty mapping works) in the late 1890s as a blue street – meaning that it was just one up from the poorest and lowest of the low.

By the time of the 1911 census, Ede’s mum and dad already had seven children.

Ede’s dad disappeared from the scene when she was very young and her mum then  died in an accident when Ede was just 16. Ede moved in with one of her older brothers and his wife and began working in Dolcis shoe shop. She was very glamorous in her youth, in the few photos we have, her and her sister Eva look like 1930s film stars, regular Joan Crawford wannabes!

She met George when a work colleague suggested Ede accompany her to a dance to meet the work colleague’s new beau – it turned out he only had eyes for Ede and ended up dancing the whole night with her and famously telling her that he was going to marry her! I’d love to have been a fly on the wall in the shoe shop the following Monday – I wonder if Ede and the work colleague ever patched things up?

Ede and George had two sons, one of whom is my dad and she was the best nan anyone could ever wish for. We were so lucky to have her around when we were growing up. She always told the best bedtime stories, we called them “mouth stories” because she made them up, they didn’t come out of a book.

She was gentle and kind and always saw the good in people. She died over 30 years ago now, but lives on through family stories and through her many and varied sayings! I still miss her so much but am proud to be able to say that she helped to make me.

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The Women Who Made Me actively welcomes submissions from anyone who has a story to tell about women from their family. To submit a woman from your family for inclusion in The Women Who Made Me project, contact Lucy of Once Upon A Family Tree. If you don’t think you have anyone, she begs to differ and can help you discover your female relatives’ lives.