Phillis Dowson’s story

While the internet is full of references – and even the text of – an American version of a Women’s Suffrage Cookbook, published to aid the cause in the States in 1915, the earlier British version is less known and considerably hard to get hold of.

The Women’s Suffrage Cookbook was compiled and edited by “Mrs Aubrey Dowson”, who held up the British tradition of resigning her own name to that of her husband despite her political views, in the early years of the 20^th Century. One reference gives its publication as 1908, but several others say 1912, so whichever is right the book was in existence at the height of the women’s suffrage campaign.

The project had two real objectives – to raise funds for the suffrage cause, and to provide quick easy dishes for women to prepare for their family so that they’d have more time for campaigning.

Whether it was her brainchild or not, the book was put together by “Mrs Aubrey Dowson”, who was born Phillis Ellen Heaton Atkinson in 1876 in Frimley, Surrey.

She was one of six children of Edmund Atkinson, an author and professor of physics at one of the Oxford colleges, and his wife Mary—the daughter of Bristol-based soap magnate Christopher J Thomas.

She grew up in Surrey, with a full complement of servants in the household, also spending time in Bristol with her grandfather. Educated well into her teens, she didn’t work afterwards, indicating that the family finances were solid enough for her to devote herself to other pursuits. Her father died in 1900, leaving a considerable amount of money to Phillis’ mother. At the age of 27 — in 1903 — Phillis married Aubrey Osler Dowson.

Aubrey had been a prominent rugby player in his youth—he played forward for New College Oxford and Leicester, and later for Moseley. He also played in the starting XV for England versus Scotland in 1899. By the time he married Phillis he had settled into a career as a glass manufacturer, but perhaps his prominent name was a factor in her choosing to be known by it rather than her own.

Aubrey’s aunt, Catherine Osler, was also well-known suffragist, who was perhaps part of influencing Phillis’s political leanings. Aubrey worked for the Osler family glass manufacturing business, and they probably had close ties with the firm.

Phillis and Aubrey had no children.

By the 1911 census Phillis was fully involved in the women’s suffrage movement, and declared herself as a women’s suffrage philanthropic worker. Her mother also expressed support for the suffrage campaign on her census return.

Many of the recipes in Phillis’s cookbook were drawn from suffrage campaigners working in the Midlands, around the Warwick and Birmingham area where she and Aubrey were living at that time. However, some well-known figures appear in the pages – Millicent Fawcett contributes some recipes, as does Helena Swanwick. She appears to have published nothing else following this cookbook. Phillis became secretary for the Midland Federation for the NUWSS.

Despite being almost 40, Aubrey signed up for military service during the Great War, leaving Phillis alone at home. He survived, but his record is one that was destroyed in a fire.

In later life, Phillis and Aubrey travelled to exotic places—Morocco and Indonesia.

They moved to a farmhouse at Hanging Langford, near Salisbury in Wiltshire, for their last years.

Aubrey died in 1940, but Phillis was not an executor of his will—he left a considerable amount of money to a solicitor and a civil servant.

Phillis outlived her husband by four years. When she died, in 1944, she left £70k to her bank.

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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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Rosanna B’s story

A “cripple” could really mean anything in Victorian terms, but was likely to refer to a person with a physical disability, whether resulting from an accident or something that someone was born with. Rosanna, who came from the small Wiltshire community of Colerne, was described as a cripple in a newspaper article that trumpeted the birth of her triplet daughters while she was an inmate at Chippenham workhouse in 1890. Her physical problem is put in as an after-thought, inserted to make a multiple birth sound more amazing.

She was a twin herself, born in the late 1850s as one of at least 11 children of an agricultural labouring family who worked the Wiltshire fields. She and her twin brother Ambrose were nearly the youngest in the family. She grew up in the rural community, but while her able-bodied siblings were able to find work in the area it appears that Rosanna could not work as easily, and she was often housed in the Chippenham workhouse.

It’s known that Rosanna had several illegitimate children. The triplets were born out of wedlock, and on a previous census return she is in the workhouse with another illegitimate daughter. In addition to these four, there are two other illegitimate girls in the area that bore her surname and might well be her children.

The earliest of these was born when Rosanna would have been around 13 – not impossible, but extremely rare for the time, as 13-year-olds were mostly still considered children and the onset of menses was generally later back then. If so, her disability may have made her unable to remove herself from a situation that resulted in intercourse – with a diagnosis of “cripple” it’s hard to know. This girl, who was named Georgina, died shortly after birth.

The first definite child that Rosanna bore was Lucy, born in 1880 when she was around 20. The 1881 census finds them together in the Chippenham workhouse, with no former profession given for Rosanna – so it’s possible that she was dependent on her parents for income, and their money would have be stretched with another mouth to feed. Sadly, Lucy died at the age of 3.

Another possible child for Rosanna was Minnie, born in 1888, but again she died very young – aged less than a year. This could mean that Rosanna had had three illegitimate daughters by her late 20s. Victorian attitudes towards disability being what they were, she may have been viewed as not a full person and therefore subject to sexual abuse, or it may also mean that the workhouse was perhaps a safer and more stable environment for her than her home, so she repeated the pattern that had her placed there.

The triplets were born in 1890, and named Lily, Violet and Rose. They were all baptised in Chippenham’s central St Andrew’s Church. Sadly, since children from multiple births are usually smaller and weaker than their singleton counterparts, and the care available in the 1890s was a far cry from today, Lily died shortly after birth.

The 1891 census finds Rosanna still in the workhouse, with Violet and Rose both aged 9 months. Rose died shortly afterwards, aged 1, while Violet survived until the following winter. Both were buried alongside their sister in Chippenham’s London Road cemetery. Rosanna was now still destitute, and childless again.

Three years later, however, her fortunes took an upturn. Somehow, she’d met a man – William –who appeared to be in steady employment and decided he would marry her. They wed in the Tabernacle church, where he appeared to be a member of the congregation but not her, in the mid 1890s. They had set up home together before marriage, living in a small dwelling where the town’s job centre modernly sits.

Rosanna had another baby, Maud, a year after the marriage. Sadly this daughter again died shortly after birth. Another daughter (Mabel) and a son (Percy) followed, and these children were the first of Rosanna’s progeny to live past toddlerhood. Percy in fact lived until his 90s, and produced four children of his own, but sadly his younger brother Ernest also died while very young.

Rosanna’ connections at the workhouse enabled William to gain a better job there as the boiler house stoker, which he held for many years. She herself became a dressmaker, and was able to contribute to the family finances while bringing up her remaining children. Later on they ran a boarding house together in the town’s picturesque St Mary Street, a business that her daughter later continued.

William died in his 70s, in the early 1930s, but Rosanna’s death remains elusive. It’s probable that she did not see the beginning of the second world war, however.

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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.

 

Emilie and Mary’s stories

“A recent addition to the industries of the town is the steam laundry,” trumpets the Wiltshire Times about Chippenham in September 1902, “or to give it its correct title the Chippenham Sanitary and Laundry Company Limited. Work was started last week in the new and capacious building which has been erected just outside of the borough boundary in Barley Close. The laundry is the only one of its kind in the neighbourhood, and may be said to supply a long felt want. Already there are 50 customers on the books, and the number is increasing daily.”

Women and washing clothes have been tied together for centuries, with many women falling into the work to make ends meet in hard times or to sustain themselves and their family when they were widowed. However, until the advent of the technology that enabled steam laundries to be established, most laundresses took in extra washing at home to supplement their income and did others’ washing alongside that of their own family.

With the advent of the steam laundry, this practice continued for married women with families who needed extra income. But the steam laundry offered extra employment opportunities for local women, and these were mostly taken by younger women straight out of school, in the time between leaving education and their own marriage.

Working at the steam laundry was considered a respected professional career for a young woman, and – although officially run by men – the day to day life of the business fell to a manageress.

The first manageress of the Chippenham Steam Laundry was Emilie, who had been brought in from a laundry in the South Wales coalfield to manage the premises, and after she moved on to London she was succeeded by a Miss Martin – who remains elusive – in 1906. The third holder of the manageress position was Mary, who took up her place in 1911.

Emilie was born in the mid-1860s in Staffordshire, the youngest of three sisters. Her father ran a bookshop, and the family were decidedly middle-class – which befitted someone who would go on to be the manageress of a workplace.

Her father died when she was only a few months old, and her mother took in boarders to keep a steady income for the family in Wolverhampton. Clearly bright, Emilie and her two older sisters were educated well into their teens, which meant that they were affluent enough to not need to leave school to contribute to the family finances. Later on they even had a domestic servant.

Her oldest sister Florence became a governess initially, which was a career that Emilie and her other sister Annie followed her into, but the advent of the steam laundries offered managerial roles to bright unmarried women of a “decent” background, and both Emilie and Florence were recruited to run a new laundry in the South Wales coalfield at the tail end of the 19^th century. Here they shared the manageress role, but it was only Emilie that was recruited to run the new Chippenham laundry in 1902.

After about four years in the Chippenham position, she went to South London to manage another laundry, which would have been a step up from the provincial nature of the Chippenham establishment.

Later on, she moved to the Hastings area to manage a laundry there – again with her sister, sharing the managerial role – and living with her mother and their other sister who were running a boarding house by the sea. Neither she nor her sisters ever married

Emilie died unmarried in her early 50s, just after the end of the first world war. Her sisters continued to live in the Hastings area until the 1950s.

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In contrast, Mary – Chippenham Steam Laundry’s third manageress – came from Norfolk, from a small rural community between the city of Norwich and the coast of East Anglia. She was the eldest of her parents’ ten children, and the family owned a grocers and drapers shop. This shop was clearly successful – their household in 1881, when Mary was four, had a domestic servant and a nursemaid, and her mother had employed the services of a monthly nurse to look after the family while she was lying in in the days following the birth of Mary’s brother Sidney.

Over the next ten years, the family moved south to Worlingworth in Suffolk and took over her paternal grandfather’s wine and spirits, grocers and drapers business in this village, building on the shop’s reputation. Clearly bright, Mary was sent to a girls’ boarding school elsewhere in Suffolk, while the brothers nearest to her in age remained at home.

It’s unclear how Mary’s career began, as her record in 1901 is elusive. As an unmarried woman, she was probably boarding somewhere, and the house owner noted down her details incorrectly. It’s likely that she started on the career towards management of industrial premises – either being employed as a manageress of another laundry or instrumental in some other industry at the time. Her career was a contrast to that of one of her sisters, who only went as far as Ipswich to be employed as a drapers’ assistant.

By 1911 Mary had travelled to Chippenham and taken up position as manageress at the Sanitary Laundry Company. Most of the workforce were women, and the bulk of them were unmarried – either young single women or those who had been widowed. Married women did work as laundresses, but tended to take in extra laundry to do alongside their own to earn money for their family, as going out to work when you were married was frowned upon. Similarly, the manageress position was held by an unmarried woman.

Laundry was collected from around the town by a man with a horse and cart (one of three men employed by the business, one of the others having the job of running the boiler), and received and sorted at the premises. Then the articles went to the wash house, where recent advances in metal rotary machines had resulted in a hydro-extractor, the drying chambers (eight of them), and the ironing room. The washing was then sorted again, ready for dispatch back to its owners by horse and cart. Of this workforce, 29 strong in 1911, Mary was in charge. She would have handled day to day management of her employees, kept an eye on the books, and sorted reordering and maintenance of the services and machines that the laundry offered. She was answerable to the company secretary, in an office elsewhere in the town, but expected to be in charge on the ground.

By the mid-point of the First World War, the laundry offered dyeing, carpet beating, and refitting of shirts – all important parts of a service that would have been done at home before women went into the industrial workforce because of the number of men on army duty.

In 1916, at the age of 40, Mary married Alfred, who had been working in Chippenham as a dental mechanic and false teeth manufacturer. He served as a soldier in the war, and was posted elsewhere. Despite propriety dictating that a married woman shouldn’t really have a job, Mary remained manageress at the laundry.

One of her brothers, Sidney, was killed at the end of the war, dying in France and Flanders just a few weeks before the armistice. Her husband survived, however.

She kept her manageress position until at least 1920, after Alfred returned from fighting, and lived with him on Malmesbury Road. By 1923, however, she’d resigned from the laundry and was not working. Alfred had moved his business up the road to Malmesbury, and Mary was with him as the dentist’s wife.

They don’t appear to have had any children, and by the outbreak of the Second World War they were still living in Malmesbury.

Mary died in 1963, aged 87, in Malmesbury.

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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.

Mary E’s story

The Women Who Made Me recently ran an exhibition at Chippenham‘s Yelde Hall, as part of the British Heritage Open Days celebration, in conjunction with Chippenham Civic Society.

Mary, who sits rather sulkily at the centre of the featured photograph, was one of the women featured.

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It is a misnomer that women rarely worked during Victorian times, and they were often fairly active in the workforce – at least until they married, and were expected to then fulfil their womanly duty by caring for their house, husband and children. Once such role that was often undertaken by women was that of postmistress, the person responsible for organising communications within a town or district.

This role in the Wiltshire market town of Chippenham was the preserve of Mary from the mid-1850s onwards, one of six women to have held that job in the town since the late 17^th century.

When she was born, in the later part of the 1820s, her paternal aunt held the role. Her father, whose family lived at the post office on the town’s high street, served as the chief clerk. Another of his unmarried sisters lived with them too, as did lodgers and a domestic servant.

Like many in Chippenham at the time, the family were non-conformists and regularly attended the Tabernacle chapel. Mary and five of her siblings were all baptised into this religion.

The family appears to have been deeply involved in local life. The post office sat between a chemist and a drapers, two of her sisters worked as milliners and dress makers, and another married the local saddler.

Mary initially served in the post office as an assistant under her aunt, but became postmistress herself when her aunt retired in 1857. She hadn’t married, which meant that she was able to take up the role. One of her younger sisters became the assistant, and her aunt and widowed father continued to live with them. Her younger brother emigrated to Michigan in America. She and her aunt remained the only members of the family to be counted within the Tabernacle congregation.

Her working hours were extremely long. The post office was open from 7am until 10pm every day, except for Sundays when it was only open from 7am until 10am, and letters to particular places were dispatched at different times of the day. They also offered money orders and savings, and insurance.

Mary took in a nephew after his parents died, and both educated him and raised him to be a carpenter. Later on, she took in a niece too. After her parents died, several post office workers also lodged at their house.

Her aunt died in the early 1870s, and Mary had sole control of the post office. She oversaw the office move in 1874 from the High Street to new bigger premises in the market place, and her staff expand to fourteen – including letter carriers, telegraph boys, postmen, stampers and auxiliary workers – who kept the business and communications of the market town working.

She died early and suddenly one morning in bed, at the tail end of the 1870s, aged 51, and was buried alongside her parents and aunt in the non-conformist burial ground in the town – which now no longer operates as a cemetery. She had given up her role very recently, on account of her health (which was stated as weak throughout her life), and was marking out her time until her replacement came.

Once she had gone, there was no named postmistress or master in the town directories and the family business had ended.

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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.

Hannah Y’s story

Direct marketing isn’t as modern a concept as you perhaps might think. Product placement and endorsement occurred from the late Victorian times onwards, as the benefits of a media hungry and increasingly literate population came to be realised by manufacturers, and advertising their products could have a direct impact on sales.

One such product endorser was Hannah Y, from the north of England, who promoted the use of gas stoves, beef extract, baking powder, gelatine, and,… er… enemas. And she gained such notoriety that her husband changed his name to hers when they married, rather than the other way around.

Born in Birmingham in the late 1850s, Hannah’s father Cornelius was a glass mould maker in the burgeoning industries in the Midlands. She was her parents’ oldest child, and was gradually joined by a succession of siblings – many of them short lived. By the age of 2 the family had left Birmingham for the glass industry at Gateshead in the north east of England, at that point located in County Durham. Here they shared a house with another family, also employed in the glass industry, and Hannah’s mother – also called Hannah – gave birth to four children, two of whom didn’t live to see their second birthday.

With the decline in the glass industry in the north east, the family moved again – this time bringing their three surviving children to Lancashire. Here Hannah studied at school until at least the age of 12, and their family survived again by finding work at the glassworks. After school, Hannah went on to gain a first-class diploma in cookery demonstration and a special merit medal from the Berkhamsted Mechanics Institute. She would have been taught cookery and household management as part of her elementary education, and probably excelled – hence travelling as far away from home as the Home Counties to further her studies as a young, single woman. In the meantime, she gained two more brothers, one who lived and one who did not.

At some point in the 1870s her father changed jobs, first becoming a whitesmith – someone who worked tin – and then working as a gas engineer for Fletcher, Russell & Co in Warrington, who manufactured gas stoves. Gas stoves had been invented in the early part of the 19^th century, but did not really take off until pipelines had been installed in most bigger UK cities. Cooking on a gas stove took a different skill to cooking on coal-fired ranges and open fires, as it was far easier to control the heat, and Fletcher, Russell & Co employed Hannah as a demonstrator of these new methods.

She ran a programme of lectures and workshops to show women how to operate the new stoves they had purchased from the company, thus endorsing their wares. This led to a cookery book that she wrote and published in 1886, with the company’s backing and blessing. Called “Domestic cookery: with special reference to cooking by gas” the book gave a selection of recipes that Hannah had developed that were plain, practical and economical, and not high class – perfect for the new owners of gas stoves. The Victorian preference for plain and simple cooking was refined and subtly developed by Hannah’s recipes, and it was reprinted many times in the years that followed.

A second book, Choice Cookery, followed in 1888 when Hannah was around 30. Like the first, this book offered further recipes adapted and refined for gas cookery, and contained adverts for gas stoves, and other appliances, alongside fine leaf gelatine and baking powder – which were used in several of the recipes – and other kitchenwares.

By the early 1890s Hannah had set up home in Sunderland, and married a Lancashire doctor. Unusually for the time, he took her surname to unite the family name rather her taking his. This meant that she did not lose the name she had been making for herself, and thus kept her notoriety and career.

After her marriage, she had business interests in Chester and ran a temperance hotel with an assistant. It was from here that Hannah took mail orders for the kitchen products that she endorsed.

In 1893 her only non-recipe book was published. This, entitled Health Without Medicine, advocates a contraption to give a self-administered enema using water – “nature’s great remedy”. Enemas were often used as a contraceptive by Victorian women at this time, but if this was Hannah’s aim it failed as she gave birth to her daughter the following year, while living in Sunderland.

Hannah’s reputation for new product endorsement led German meat extract manufacturers Liebig to employ her to promote their product in the mid-1890s. Hannah published the Liebig Company’s Practical Cookery Book, which contained many ingenious ways to cook using meat extract. She also spent time back home working in Lancashire, living next to her brother – who was also employed by the gas stove manufacturers.

Her final book, Home Made Cakes and Sweets, was published in the middle of the first decade of the 20^th century, when she and her family had moved to Cambridgeshire. Here Hannah continued to sell specific ingredients and equipment from home, as well as lecturing and demonstrating cookery, alongside her husband’s work as a general practitioner.

Her daughter grew up and married a doctor, and her husband and son-in-law practiced together in Cambridgeshire, the family living together in one large house. Her husband died in the late 1940s, leaving his money to their daughter. Hannah died about a year later, aged 90.

Essex L’s story

Born in the 1770s in Buckinghamshire as the third daughter of a landed family, Essex – who was named after her grandmother, an heiress from a prominent banking family – grew up in a large house with many servants in the late 18^th and early 19^th century. There were several daughters born after Essex. This was the Pride and Prejudice era, full of genteel society and strict governance of manners, with daughters encouraged to make good and advantageous matches with upstanding gentlemen.

Her father – who had changed his name from William Lowndes to William Selby in order to inherit a property called Whaddon Hall – had been MP for Buckinghamshire, as had his father before him, and her brother also held this job from 1810 to 1820. His children often used the name Selby-Lowndes to reflect their heritage and their inherited property. They lived at Winslow Hall in Buckinghamshire, another inherited property. Her mother died when she was a child, and she and her siblings were brought up by her father and servants.

It was under the name Lowndes that Essex married Robert Humphrys, the son of the Chippenham clothier Matthew Humphrys, who owned Chippenham’s central Ivy House. The marriage took place, as all best society weddings did at the time, in London in 1811. Robert’s father had died the year before, so he owned the house, and Essex came into some inherited money from a spinster aunt at the same time, so the marriage would have been considered a good prospect from both sides.

However, she was 38 when she married, and by the standards of the time this was very late – she would have been viewed as a confirmed spinster in the eyes of the society that she moved in. As an adult she had lived at home with her father and several unmarried sisters, and would have lived a sheltered and gentle life with the help of their servants.

After she married she came to live at the Ivy House with Robert, and was thus mistress of the property. Her father-in-law had acquired the house from the Northey family in 1791 after using portions of the land from the 1770s onwards, and had adapted the grounds to suit his business. There were outbuildings and cottages on the land which housed dyeing and weaving works and workers – and it was into this busy world that Essex arrived. Spinning, carding, weaving, and warping all took place on a small scale in homes, whereas cloth works would have done the finishing. The cloth and textile trade was still Chippenham’s main industry at the time, and to maintain the Ivy House Robert would have been successful in this business – although it was still a far cry from being a fully mechanised industry in the early part of the 19^th century, and already was under threat from the power looms being installed in factories in the north of England.

Three years after the marriage, Essex’s sister Elizabeth Selby Lowdnes married Rev Robert Ashe – part of a prominent Chippenham landowning family, as his second wife. This meant that she had her sister close by, as she lived at Langley House, and they were probably introduced by Essex as they would have moved in the same social circles – with balls and hunts and card parties. Elizabeth died in in 1829, childless.

Essex and Robert also appear to have had no children – they lived in the era before civil birth registration, but there are no christenings recorded in local churches. This is supported by the fact that when Robert died in 1838 he left everything to Essex.

Her inheritance included the house, farms, cottages, aqueducts (presumably providing water for the cloth works), and all of his land. However, all his mortgages and debts were passed to her as part of this inheritance, so she would have had to manage much of his remaining business in her widowhood. His works did not fall apart, so she appears to have been successful at this.

Shortly after this, her eldest brother died and another brother sold her childhood home for it to become a school. Finances may also have been eased by more inheritance from another childless aunt. A trade directory of Chippenham from the early 1840s lists Essex among the local gentry.

Essex continued to live at Ivy House throughout her long widowhood, supported by servants. There are five in the house with her in 1841, and ten years later she only has one less. These were a cook, a lady’s maid, a housemaid and a butler. The property was vast for just these five people, and probably took a lot of work on their behalf to maintain. There appears to have been no shortage of money though – she refers to herself on census records as a “land and funded proprietor”, meaning that she drew income from tenants and other funds.

Essex died in 1868, aged 96. Her executors were a nephew based in Buckinghamshire and the local MP Gabriel Goldney. She left nearly £25,000 – a vast sum for the time. The Ivy House, with no children to inherit it, was auctioned and acquired by the Rooke family, who lived there until 1973.

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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.

Sarah T’s story

A plumber’s daughter, Sarah Tanner grew up relatively comfortably in the 1840s and 50s in the rapidly expanding Wiltshire market town of Chippenham. The youngest of at least seven siblings, her family did well after the railway came to the town and her father’s business grew big enough to support employees and keep daughters at home until they married rather than sending them out to work.

However, while two of her elder sisters chose to remain at home until they wed, Sarah did not choose this route. By the age of 18 she and her eldest sister Mary were running a seeds and food shop on Chippenham’s High Street, which – given the town was growing rapidly at this time – almost certainly saw good trade.

At the age of 30 her sister Mary married a widowed yeoman farmer turned publican, and presumably left Sarah to run the business herself. Her brother in law’s career may have led Sarah to meet her own husband – Joseph Buckle, the widower landlord of one of Chippenham’s biggest hostelries on the town’s market place – who she married at the age of 28.

This marriage gained her two step-children from her husband’s previous marriage – a girl aged 8 and a boy aged 4 – and her husband had a stepson of his own from his former wife’s marriage. It also gained Sarah a pub, a business that kick started a career that lasted over 30 years. Although her husband was named landlord, the 1871 census record has Sarah’s occupation as a licenced victualler’s wife – indicating that she was fairly active in the day to day life of the establishment – but the enumerator concerned has crossed this description out, as it was considered invalid.

Sarah had her own daughter a year or so after her marriage. She was heavily pregnant again with her son Joe when her husband died suddenly, leaving her the business, his money, and their combined children. Her son was born a month after his father’s death, and Sarah renewed the pub’s licence in her name within another month.

She ran the pub with the help of her step-children and a couple of domestic servants for another three years until she married again. The marriage took place at Chippenham’s parish church, and was witnessed by her stepdaughter. Her second husband was a former soldier who came from Nottinghamshire, and in accordance with the law of the time he took over the hotel and pub licence – if the woman was married, her property became her husband’s. The couple ran the pub together for another four years – with her eldest stepdaughter as barmaid –  and had a daughter together. They then gave up the business, and moved a few streets away. It’s unclear what they were surviving on – when their second daughter was baptised a couple of years later Sarah’s husband’s profession is given as a former soldier and a hotel business isn’t mentioned – but it’s possible that her inheritance from her first husband was enough to keep them comfortably.

However, this existence did not last. Sarah’s second husband died in 1887, aged 40, leaving her widowed for the second time. At this stage her stepchildren were adults, but she had four dependent children – a son aged 14 and daughters aged 15, 9, and 2 – and no visible means of support.

She went back into the pub trade to provide for her family, based on the many years of experience she’d had at the hotel. She founded a Wine and Spirits vaults in Chippenham’s market place, just a stone’s throw away from the original pub and ran that until 1892. At this point business was clearly booming, despite the growth of the temperance movement, and she was able to both found another pub/hotel in the market place and run a second one nearby for another ten years, taking her through to the early 20th century. She did not marry again, and therefore kept the income and status her businesses generated.

In the early 1900s, when she was getting on in years, she relinquished the pub trade and moved in with her unmarried son Joe Buckle as his housekeeper. He, and the husband of one of her daughters, ran a popular fishmongers and poultry shop on Chippenham’s high street in a timbered building that no longer exists, and it’s likely that Sarah helped out with this business as she aged too. Joe also became the town’s fire chief, and was a well-known local figure.

She died in her mid-70s, at the beginning of the 1920s. Her son eventually married four years after her demise.

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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.