Elise G’s story

Imagine being intelligent enough and working hard enough to achieve a doctorate in mathematics, in an era where women were only just allowed to earn them, and then being denied the title by some foreign men because you were a) from a different country and they weren’t sure they recognised the institution you earned your qualification in, and b) a married woman. This happened to Elise – a well deserving holder of a PhD, but referred to as Mrs (despite a divorce) when she found work as a maths teacher.

The second daughter of a Czechoslovakian lawyer, Elise was born at the turn of the 20^th century in Most, a Bohemian city in the northern part of what is now Czechia. The region was German-speaking – Most’s German name is Brüx – and Elise grew up speaking that language. Her family was Jewish, well-educated and quite well-to-do.

During the first world war, when the situation for Jews in that area was good, she and her sister Kathe attended high school in their home town, with Elise showing a particular aptitude for mathematics. She went on to study at the local college at 16, graduating in 1923, and then went on to the University of Vienna for four further years – gaining a distinction in maths – and achieving a doctorate in 1928. At the time, women were only admitted to doctorates in certain subjects at the University of Vienna. Somewhere along the way she’d met and married Ernst, a junior lawyer in her father’s office, in about 1924 and gave birth to a daughter around 1928. However, the marriage did not work out and ended in divorce.

After qualifying for her doctorate, and gaining the first part of a teaching diploma, she spent eight years as visiting lecturer at the University of Prague, and then moved to be the Statistical Expert at the Institute of Market Research in Vienna. Her father died in 1931, but her mother continued to live in Most. By this point, the situation for Jews in this part of Europe was getting dangerous. Her daughter, then around 10, was excluded from her school in Vienna on the basis of her Jewish background, so she and Elise returned to Prague. Her daughter managed to escape in January 1939 as part of the Kindertransport with the help of the Barbican Mission to the Jews, based in London’s East End, who saved around 100 children in the nine months up to the outbreak of World War II. The idea of the mission was that the Jewish children should convert to Christianity, which did not particularly bother Elise or her ex-husband as – though Jewish by birth – they were agnostic. Elise was able to follow her two months later, on a domestic permit – presumably with the idea of being able to care for her – but left her mother and ex-husband behind. Her sister had married and moved to Chile with her husband, which may have been considered as another avenue of escape, but ultimately the domestic permit provide Elise with the means to leave.

England at the time was not a particularly cosmopolitan place. Many people had not been abroad – the country was decades away from package holidays – and much of the news from the area that Elise came from centred on Hitler and the activities of the Nazi party, so even rescued Czech Jews could be viewed with suspicion. In addition, Elise’s doctorate came from a non-British university, so many might doubt the rigour of that education as it was “different” to that which they had experienced.

Therefore, Elise had to find work in England as and where she could. With the help of people within the Barbican Mission for the Jews she began working as a chamber maid, then a cook and a governess, and the 1939 register – taken a few weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War – has her performing domestic duties for a female accountant in London, though the register acknowledges that she is a statistics expert, and she probably helped the accountant as well as doing the cleaning. But on this form her doctorate is not acknowledged. Her daughter lived separately, with the mission in a home in the Brockley area, and Elise’s access to her was restricted.

In January of 1940, with many of the male teachers starting to be taken into the forces as the war got underway, there were starting to be shortages in teaching staff in many schools. She managed to gain a position as temporary science mistress at Thorn Bank school in Malvern-Wells, Worcestershire. This was a small private school for girls, which did not have a great deal of funds for equipment. Elise taught here on her wits and vast knowledge, as her only scientific equipment was pieces of litmus paper. However, the stability of this job meant that her daughter was returned to her care, and they lived together in Malvern-Wells and later in Carlisle where Elise held a mathematics teaching position for a year from September of 1940 that was slightly better than the previous post but not by much.

From here, she had an interview with the head of a town grammar school in Wiltshire on the railway station platform at Derby with a view to replacing his head of maths who was serving in the RAF, and got the job. Whereas the governors of that school were not particularly worldly at that time, the head teacher was young and a Quaker, part of the Rowntree chocolate manufacturing family of York, and as part of the company business had even been abroad. He recognised that a doctorate from the University of Vienna was equal to one from a British university, and persuaded the governors to take on Elise – though in a nod to their reservations she was still referred to as Mrs and not as Doctor. They may also have had reservations as the previous replacement was also a German Jewish refugee and had been interned in an Enemy Alien camp for a few months in 1940, and they may have feared losing Elise to this fate too – although it was only the men who were interred in the end.

Elise became the senior maths teacher of the school, in Bradford on Avon, and her daughter enrolled too. She was well liked by staff and pupils alike, and respected by all. Her heavy accent apparently was difficult to understand at first, but many students found her lessons inspirational. She was paid on the standard scale, with slight deductions for being in a temporary position and technically an alien, but was awarded a special payment for her exceptional qualifications – which they still weren’t formally recognising – in 1943.

During this period, both her mother and ex-husband – who had not been able to escape the Nazi regime – were placed by the Third Reich. Communication would have been non-existent, so she probably would not have known of their fate until after the war. Her mother was sent to the Theresienstadt Jewish ghetto, with other Czech Jews, which eventually became a labour camp. She was then sent on to Auschwitz, where she died in the gas chambers sometime in either 1943 or 1944. Ernst, Elise’s ex-husband, was sent to the ghetto at Łódź, Poland, where he died of starvation in 1943. Her teaching position, and life in the UK, must have included hope that her family and friends had somehow survived.

Elise, second left, with other grammar school staff in 1944

Elise remained at the grammar school in Bradford on Avon until the end of the school year in 1945, when – the war having ended in May, at least in Europe – it was expected that the head of maths would return from RAF duty and take his place again at the school. In practice, this did not happen until 1946, and another German refugee was employed until then. The job did belong to the original head of maths, but it is fair to say that Elise was far better qualified for the role than he was.

She moved to be maths teacher at the Greenford County School, in Middlesex, and her daughter moved with her. In 1947 she applied for British naturalisation. After a few years here she was able to make the switch back into working in higher education in London, ultimately teaching at Brunel University. She was active in both the English and German language fields of maths, and here reclaimed the title of Dr again as it was finally recognised.

Her daughter lived with her in Wembley until her marriage in the late 1950s, after which she appears to have lived alone. She visited her sister Kathe in Chile in the late 1950s and early 60s. After Kathe’s husband’s death in the early 1970s Kathe went back to Germany and lived in Munich, so Elise had a ready made base there when she travelled for work. She eventually had two grandsons.

She also continued her research while working in higher education. There is a picture of her attending the Edinburgh Mathematical Society Colloquium in St Andrews, Scotland, in 1976. She is also mentioned as a member of the Austrian Mathematics Association by the International Mathematical News published in Vienna in 1977. By this point she was living in Latymer Court in Hammersmith, built in 1934 and described at that time as the largest single luxury block of flats in Europe.

In 1978 she was awarded a Golden Doctorate from the University of Vienna, an accolade given to those who have reached 50 years since their original doctorate and are still continuing to research and push the boundaries of their subject. She still did not stop there – in 1983, at the age of 80, she delivered a paper in Germany on “The practical treatment of stress concentrations and singularities within the finite element displacement algorithms”, and there is mention of her having delivered lectures for the Open University.

She died in 1991, aged 88, and was buried close to home in London.

Charlotte Marvelous’ story

Charlotte Marvelous sounds like a rather fantastic stage name for a Victorian circus performer. Or possibly a burlesque dancer.

In reality, however, she was the faithful housekeeper to a Sheffield bookseller, and almost certainly never saw as much as a prancing pony or a nipple tassel. But Marvelous wasn’t her real surname, and was probably a mark of deep affection given to her by her employer.

She’d been born in Eydon, a rurally-set village in Northamptonshire, towards the end of the 18^th century. She was her parents’ seventh child of at least eleven, and not the first to have the name Charlotte – there’d been an older sister called Charlotte who’d died at a year old a few years earlier. While calling a child after one who’d died might seem a little morbid, this was relatively common at this time, with a far higher rate of infant mortality than today. Charlotte was not even the only child in the family for this to happen to – she had two brothers named John, one being born just over a month after the first one died at the age of seven.

Her parents, William and Maria Hunt, don’t appear to have been anyone particularly of note in the village – which mostly had a mixture of agricultural workers and house-based weavers – although towards the more well-to-do end of the scale given the professions of the men their daughters married and the fact that many of them were able to write their names on their wedding records so were at least partially literate. Charlotte was a witness to her sister Lavinia’s wedding in 1808, and was able to write her name.

In 1812, at around the age of 23, Charlotte married James, an agricultural labourer, in her home village of Eydon. James’ surname was Marvesley, so she became Charlotte Marvesley. There are no children in the baptismal records that fit, so it’s likely that their marriage was childless. As a farm labourer’s wife, it’s likely that Charlotte stayed at home doing domestic duties – which would have been considerable at the time – but it’s possible that she may have had some duties on the farm too.

However, after 13 years of marriage, her husband James died and was buried in their home village. With no children, and no visible means of support, Charlotte would have had to find work of some kind. Her mother died a year later, so she may have supported her father until his death in 1833. Her sisters Lavinia and Maria had married, as had her sister Diana, and her surviving brother John was living in Oxfordshire with his wife. What exactly happened to Charlotte next is unclear until she appears on the 1841 census in Sheffield, in her forties and in the employ of a bookseller.

What is likely is that she somehow came across George Brown, the book seller, through her brother in law Thomas. Thomas, also a book seller although formerly a tailor, had married Charlotte’s sister Diana. They’d moved around Northamptonshire, Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Lancashire, after leaving Eydon and the clothes business behind, and it’s probably that Thomas came across George through his work, and knew that George needed a housekeeper as much as Charlotte needed a comfortable position.

George had never married, it appears, so as a 19^th century bachelor would have needed some help around the house – both in terms of housework and food preparation. A Victorian housekeeper would also have run the financial aspects of the household, so Charlotte would have had some financial nous and book-keeping skills. It’s also likely that she would have kept the books for his business, a role that many wives took on in small businesses at this time. So, to many intents and purposes Charlotte was George’s wife, without the benefits.

In 1841 they are living in Arundel Street, in the centre of Sheffield. Her sister Diana and her husband and children are nearby. Both men are working as booksellers. Diana died in 1847. By 1849, Charlotte and George had moved to Eyre Street, and it’s there they can be found on the 1851 census. On this record George claims to be married, but there’s no sign of a wife.

It appears to have been George that coined the name Charlotte Marvelous, as she’s not referred to as Marvesley after she enters his employ. It would almost certainly have been George that provided the information for the census enumerators, so using the name Marvelous perhaps speaks of the great esteem he held Charlotte in. So, rather than a stage name, the moniker refers to her personal traits and how well she supported him in his life, and speaks volumes for their relationship. The first use of Marvelous occurs when she witnesses her niece’s wedding in Eydon in 1830.

In 1851 one of Charlotte’s sisters, Maria, left the UK with her husband and children to join the Latter Day Saints in America, settling initially in Missouri and then in Illinois. Another sister, Lavinia (by this stage a widowed lacemaker still based in Eydon) did the same in 1854, and was eventually claimed by the LDS. Her sister Diana, while she was alive, had been a member of the Moravian church – so it appears that many of the family, despite being baptised into the Church of England, questioned the traditional way of faith. Whether this was Charlotte’s way is open to question, but like most people of the time it’s probable that she had deep Christian faith.

By 1857, trade directories show that George – and therefore Charlotte – had moved to Bridge Street, and he had taken up bookbinding in addition to selling tomes. However, both of them are elusive on the 1861 census – it’s always possible that they’d gone to visit her family in America, as shipping records are unavailable that early. Their Bridge Street premises has a brewer in residence instead.

Later that decade Charlotte and George were living at Park Wood Springs, a piece of woodland and open space just outside central Sheffield at that time. This may have been a deliberate move on George’s part to help Charlotte’s health – as she was now in her mid-70s, considerably aged for the time – which was starting to fail. By 1863 she was suffering from a liver complaint, which was recorded as hepatitis, but is unlikely to have been the sort of hepatitis we would recognise as such today. It’s possible that Charlotte could have been an excessive drinker, but it seems unlikely that she’d have lasted to a ripe old age if she had, so it is more likely that she had a viral type of hepatitis that was passed on somehow – possibly infected blood – which would have led to jaundice.

Charlotte died at Park Wood Springs in early October 1864, aged 78. George registered her death, and said that she’d suffered chronic hepatitis for a year, which had led to anasarca – a liver-based problem associated with the condition that finished her off. Very telling is that he registered her as “widow of ________ Marvelous, farm labourer”, which indicates that she never referred to James by name to George and instead called him “my late husband”. This may indicate that the relationship between Charlotte and George, who were around 12 years apart in age, was very proper and more like mother and son than anything else.

George buried her in Sheffield’s Burngreave cemetery, at the time a new and extensive facility outside the rapidly growing town, and marked her grave with her place of birth to tie her forever to the place she grew up. In many ways he was the only family she had left, particularly locally. He also had “she was faithful in all her dealings” carved on the stone, which again speaks of the affectionate partnership they must have had for many years.

George continued to run his book business in Sheffield’s Orchard Street for a few more years, but died himself in 1868 and was buried alongside Charlotte. Dear friends of his, John and Elizabeth Parr, also took the same grave when their time came, leading to a rather disparately related monument in the cemetery that shows the ties and bonds that were made as the industrial nature of the 19^th century took hold and many – like Charlotte Marvelous – came to the big city for work leaving family behind.

Harriet and Mary Ann’s story

Abortion was illegal in the UK until 1967, so unfortunately when we hear about it publicly before this date it is likely because it has gone disastrously wrong. This is the case in Harriet Wigmore and Mary Ann Salter’s story from 1883, which may also feature elements of injustice in the British legal system of the time. It’s up to the reader to decide based on the evidence.

Wherever your politics, moral and religious beliefs take you on the subject of abortion, a crisis pregnancy is exactly that – one that a woman feels that she cannot continue with, whether for health, mental health, society factors, or any other myriad of reasons. And until a woman faces that situation, it is a real unknown as to how she will react and then choose to act. In most countries around the world abortion has been illegal at some point – and in some it still is, or is verging on being again – and therefore making a choice to end a pregnancy puts a woman into a particularly murky place morally, religiously and societally. But wherever you personally fall on these matters, some women will still want abortions.

Abortion is, therefore, very much part of women’s history. Particularly in an era when “good” girls were supposed to be chaste until marriage, sexual desire on the part of women was barely even known about much less discussed, and illegitimate children carried a huge societal stigma. However, men who did engage in sexual intercourse outside marriage – although perhaps frowned upon – were not subject to the same stigma, and male desire was an acknowledged concept throughout all walks of life.

An advert from the 1890s, advertising pills and remedies for female ailments.

Therefore, when Mary Ann Salter – a single Wiltshire woman not in her first flush of youth – discovered she was pregnant in the spring of 1883, she had to decide whether to keep the baby and face the wrath of society, or undergo an illegal abortion.

She’d been born in Chippenham in the early 1850s, the oldest child of a gardener and his wife, and lived in a small cottage to the east of the town. After some schooling she lived at home with her parents and siblings, and contributed to the family income as a dressmaker. However, unmarried and staring her thirties in the face, she left the confines of a Wiltshire market town and went to London, gaining a position as a cook in an affluent townhouse. She was there for six years. She worked for a chemist and his family, as one of several servants with the family, and her employer had several unmarried sons living at home and working in his business.

It’s unknown exactly who fathered Mary Ann’s child, it could have been one of her employers’ sons or someone else entirely, but during the spring of 1883 she lost her job and returned home to Chippenham, to her recently widowed mother’s care. About this time she began to complain of “indigestion”.

Most women at this time were kept ignorant of the mechanics of sexual intercourse until they were married – when it was therefore considered necessary for them to know – but even then information (usually lying back and thinking of England) was not passed on easily between mother and daughter, and men were often ignorant too. The attitude of many doctors was that women had no sexual feelings apart from the urge to have children. So, it may be that Mary Ann did not know exactly what had happened to her.

Her lover may also have been uninformed to a degree – unmarried men were often not given the full picture either, and contraceptives at this time were very much in their infancy. There were leather condoms for men, but these were expensive and had to be asked for directly at the chemists as they weren’t displayed. Women could use an inserted piece of sponge on a string that was coated with a spermicide substance, but only if they knew about it, which Mary Ann probably didn’t.

Therefore, when Mary Ann complained of indigestion, her mother took her to see a herbalist in Calne, the next town over, for a remedy as this would have been cheaper than seeing a doctor.

This herbalist was Harriet Wigmore, who at this time was in her early 40s. She’d been born in Herefordshire, had married her husband Isaac in Wolverhampton, and they’d had six children together: John, Ann, Harriet, Jane, Richard, Thomas and Ruth. Isaac had come back to Wiltshire to run a pub near Malmesbury, making Harriet a landlady for a time, but by the early 1880s he was settled in Calne as a gardener and Harriet ran a herbalism business alongside him.

On Mary Ann’s first visit to Harriet, she was supplied with some liquid and 16 powders to take to cure her indigestion. This, obviously, didn’t work, and Mary Ann made several subsequent visits for further treatments, accompanied on occasion by relatives and friends of her mother. Whether the true nature of Mary Ann’s condition became obvious to Harriet during these visits is unknown. Harriet insisted, later, that she did not know at all, and certainly outwardly she was still treating Mary Ann for digestion-based complaints.

Since Mary Ann was still not cured and had taken to her bed, Harriet came to visit her in Chippenham, and they spent some time alone talking. Mary Ann then, four days later, went again to visit Harriet in Calne. Upon her return she felt unwell, vomited, and went to bed. Then a further three days later Harriet again came to see Mary Ann and her mother, and this time – according to witnesses – made it clear that something had happened to Mary Ann. Her mother stated that Harriet had said: “If anyone asks what is the matter you say it is a tumour, but it has burst now, and she will soon be all right.” And another witness said that she’d said it was a bloody tumour and she would soon be all right and up in two or three days. These witnesses also say that Harriet took something away in her basket. The following day a doctor was called, who said that Mary Ann was suffering from inflammation of the womb and peritonitis, and sadly Mary Ann died later that day.

Given the now serious nature of the matter, a post-mortem was performed on her the following day by the doctor. The opinion was that she had died either from the effects of the noxious drugs (fennel and rue were found), from the effects of an instrument used upon her, or from both. Harriet was subsequently arrested.

Heira Picra, or Hickey Pickey, could be bought from the chemist

Information about how to administer an abortion was well known in whispers among married women at this time, for occasions when they felt they could not afford another mouth to feed. Some doctors at the time reckoned that one in four pregnancies ended this way. There were many dangerous methods: pints of gin, hot baths, knitting needles inserted into the womb, falling downstairs. Alternatively, there were dangerous drugs, which brought on an abortion as a side-effect: adhesive plasters contained diachylon, which was made from lead and could be bought from the chemist, and would then be eaten. There was also a mixture called ‘hickey-pickey’ (hicra picra, or hiera picra), which was bitter apple, bitter aloes and white lead, which could all be purchased from the chemist. Infusions of rue were a known irritant, and had abortifacient properties, and was sometimes combined with other herbal infusions to increase potency.

Rue, a common herb at the time.

It is likely that at least two of these methods – inserting an instrument, and a rue or fennel or pennyroyal infusion – were used in Mary Ann’s case. But whether they were administered by Harriet the herbalist – as the subsequent murder court case claimed – or by Mary Ann’s mother and friends, is open to question.

Pennyroyal plant, said to “bring on menses”.

The trial took place in Chippenham town hall, not the regular place for legal proceedings at the time. This was due to the number of people interested in the case who swelled the attendance. Still more people waited outside. Harriet was led through jostling crowds to the court.

The prosecution alleged that Mary Ann’s mother claimed Harriet said to her that she had “instruments”, but they were never to be seen. Harriet apparently carried away something from the house in a bag. And the post-mortem, having found no trace of any noxious drugs in Mary Ann’s stomach, concluded that the cause of death was the instrument used to expel the pregnancy, which was used with enough force to cause the internal bruises and that Mary Ann could not have administered that herself. This was the case against Harriet.

Her defence argued that Harriet had not been seen to possess one single noxious drug in this case, and that a single piece of “rue” might not actually be the plant. And that the instruments described were not to be seen, much less obviously used. They also felt that the day the instruments were used was the day that Mary Ann had travelled to Calne and back on the train, and that if she’d suffered the amount of bruising and wounding that day she would not have been able to walk properly. The defence suggested that Mary Ann had suffered a miscarriage, and that Harriet perhaps had attempted to help her evacuate the womb to both improve her health and save her reputation. Or that Mary Ann’s friends and relations may have attempted to do the same, and subsequently accidentally caused her death.

The summing up of the case by the judge was as follows:

His Lordship, addressing the jury, said it was the law of England that a person who, pursuing a felonious intent, brought about the death of another person was guilty of murder. Thus, if this woman endeavoured to procure abortion and in doing so produced Mary Ann’s death, it was murder. But if treating Mary Ann for an innocent purpose and not to procure abortion and death – through her unskilfulness – followed it was not murder but manslaughter. It was important to consider whether drugs and instruments had been used. The doctor had said that an instrument must have been used. Then who used it? Could the poor woman herself or her friends? No suspicion was associated with the friends; and it must be remembered that the deceased and the prisoner were in frequent association.

Whatever actually happened to Mary Ann, and the role of her mother and Harriet in the case, in the end, Harriet was found guilty of manslaughter by the jury. Her words on hearing the verdict were:

I am not guilty. I am entirely innocent. It is only a vile conspiracy on the part of (Mary Ann’s mother) and her friends. Oh, my lord, I knew no more of her true condition than you did. Oh, my poor children, don’t take me away from them.

It is hard, from a modern perspective, to read this case and not wonder if details were missed, and conclusions drawn on the part of each of the women involved that related to society and women’s expected role within the social structure. Modern investigation and medical practices might also have had a bearing on the case. It may be that Harriet – reportedly a devout Baptist – was entirely innocent, and suffered a miscarriage of justice, or it may be that as a married woman with six children of her own she knew how not have another and applied that knowledge to Mary Ann. What is certain though is that Mary Ann’s death was entirely accidental, and the villain of the piece is neither party, nor the man who made Mary Ann pregnant, but the society that they lived in that both denied women’s sexuality and desire, and vilified women for acting upon them in an entirely natural manner.

Harriet was jailed for ten years for the manslaughter, and sent to Woking prison, many miles away in Surrey. This was the first purpose-built female prison in Britain. Her husband remained local to Calne and Chippenham, bringing up their children. Woking Prison had farm land that the women worked, but they also worked in the laundry, and making twine, and in tailoring.

Female convicts exercising at Woking | The Graphic | 31 August 1889

However, seven years into her sentence Harriet was declared insane and taken to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum in Berkshire until a further order or the expiration of her sentence.

The female dormitory at Broadmoor

In 1893, when her original sentence ran out, Harriet was taken to the Wiltshire County Asylum at Devizes where she remained indefinitely. It is from their records that we can decipher what had happened to her.

Her insistence of her innocence in the case that had convicted her had by this time become an obsession, and she had been therefore diagnosed of chronic mania with delusions of persecution.

The doctor reports:

Says she is the victim of a conspiracy to deprive her of her liberty – that she is cruelly and shamefully treated by those in authority, preventing her husband and friends communicating with her or to make any effort to alleviate her sufferings: that her trial, sentence and consequent confinement are illegal.

Her confinement and treatment in prison, not surprisingly, appears to have had an extremely detrimental effect on her mental health. Harriet is the only patient at the time not to have a photograph included in the records – she apparently believed that if they took one they might use it against her to persecute her. Reports are that she believed the staff were against her, and that she was a force of good and others were wicked. She read and quoted from the Bible continually, and wrote to committees and asked to be released – which was denied. Victorian psychiatric care being what it was, there is no treatment recorded for Harriet and it appears that their plan was to lock her up until she gave up this insistence of her innocence. She never did.

She somehow collected money while in the asylum, which she intended to use to aid her escape, but it’s unknown exactly where this money came from. There are three incidences of her being caught with money that she should not have had, once while bathing a sovereign disguised as a button was found in her clothes, and another time she was found to have bought epsom salts while out shopping with other inmates in Devizes.

The asylum at Devizes, where Harriet spent many years of her life

Aside from her mental health, she apparently was a great sportswoman who had a real affinity with animals. She acted as the hospital rat catcher. She was also described as an ardent naturalist – which fits with her plant knowledge as a herbalist.

She was kept in the Wiltshire Asylum for 23 years past the end of her original sentence, and does not ever appear to have given up her claim of innocence. Release, when it occurred, appears to have been unremarkable. She had had some physical health issues and was quietly allowed to return to her husband Isaac in the summer of 1915, at the age of 75.

He had been living with his sister and her husband in Oxfordshire, working as a jobbing gardener. They had six years that could have been spent together before he died leaving his assets to her. He had been living in Malmesbury, but it does not look like she was living with him when he died.

It’s unknown where she went after this, but the most likely death record for her is in Bedwellty, Monmouthshire, in 1924.

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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.