Clara M’s story

Musical prodigy Clara excelled on the piano and as a vocalist, and was entertaining on the concert platform in fashionable mid-19^th century Bath by the age of nine and soon gracing stages in London and the provinces. As a young woman though, she had tired of the attention, so eloped with her sweetheart Joseph – another fine musician, but alas not so fine at business ventures, so her musical talents earned her family’s living in possibly the most genteel way possible.

She’d been born in 1844 in Widcombe, Bath, but for some reason her parents Major John Henry and Emily Diana MacFarlane (née Cottle) had opted to have her baptised at Temple Church in Bristol a couple of years later. This may have been on account of them not actually being married at the time, though they did sort that out by 1854. Her father called himself a professor of the pianoforte, sometimes a professor of music, but at this sort of time there was very little regulation for these sorts of qualification claims and he most likely took his professorship from the fact that he played well enough to be able to teach others. His father before him had been a banker, and he’d been brought up in London, so he had the means and background to be able to study music seriously.

Clara was her parents’ oldest child, and was followed by two sisters – Kate and Marion – and later two brothers, Walter and Alexander. Marion died at about 10 months old, but the rest of her siblings survived. Her widowed paternal grandmother lived close by while she was growing up, and taught children in an infants’ school, while her father took on piano pupils.

Her first reported performance was in Corsham, Wiltshire, just after Christmas in 1855, at a vocal and instrumental concert directed by her father. She was purported to be nine years old, but in reality had probably recently turned ten. The Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette said:

“The performance of Miss Clara Macfarlane, the talented juvenile pianiste and vocalist, elicited great applause from the audience, who were surprised at the powers of so young a performer.”

In March the following year she was part of a benefit concert for the Nightingale Fund at the Guildhall in Bath, where her father had invited the nobility, gentry and inhabitants of the city to hear her play alongside musicians from the Bristol Philharmonic Concerts and the Band of the North Somerset Yeomanry Cavalry in full uniform. The Nightingale Fund, though officially funded in 1857, was earlier than that part of fundraising undertaken for Florence Nightingale towards the end of the Crimean War.

Clara’s father again conducted, and she was again supposed to be only nine years old. The newspapers, in this case London’s Morning Herald, were again gushing in their praise.

“A very interesting portion of the entertainment consisted of the pianoforte performances of Miss Clara Macfarlane, a child only nine years of age. The audience were most agreeably surprised at the powers of execution and the musical genius which she manifested. She performed, in an admirable manner, two fantasias, one of airs from L’Elisir, and the other from Lucrecia Borgia. We have no hesitation in predicting for this child much future fame.”

Subsequent prominent concerts, of which there are several, make no mention of her age – being in single digits was clearly a selling point, and once she’d passed that it wasn’t remarked upon. Instead, she’s referred to as a “juvenile pianiste”. Press reviews are no less glowing, however old she was. There were performances at the Bath Guildhall, the Cardiff Assembly Rooms, the New Hall (now the Neeld Hall) in Chippenham and the Court Hall in Trowbridge before she was twelve years old.

The 1861 census found the family living at Nile Street in Bath, with her father describing himself as an organist – so, in addition to teaching the piano, arranging and conducting concerts, and playing the cornet à pistons for solos, as several concert reviews report, he also had a hand in church music at that time. Clara was fourteen and described as a scholar, so was continuing her education beyond the minimum – though her studies could just have been musical.

As the 1860s wound on, reports of Clara’s musical prowess continued, although her young age is mentioned less and less in reports as her abilities became slightly remarkable in the context of her peers. Her father around now owned a music shop on Pultney Bridge in Bath, selling instruments and sheet music. There were notable performances in Midsomer Norton and Bristol, and she was often appearing alongside her father’s work. Away from the reported concerts, she was probably in a world of choral societies, private appearances, endless rehearsals and constant practice, and after spending so much of her childhood as her father’s display, this may have been wearing a little thin. Her mother also seems to have died at some point in the 1860s, as by 1871 her father was calling himself a widower. An exact record for this has proved illusive, however.

Around the concert circuits, Clara had met singer Joseph Goold, who hailed from Corsham – just a few miles east of Bath. He was one of the sons of a prosperous tan-yard and quarry owner in the tiny Wiltshire town, and as such would have been on a similar class footing to Clara. He also had a beautiful bass singing voice. The family story goes that Joseph approached Major John Henry Macfarlane and asked for her hand in marriage, which was refused in no uncertain terms. Her marriage would effectively end her performing career – in respectable circles at this time, and even more so as the 19^th century wore on, married women did not publicly appear on concert stages, no matter how talented they were. Their talents went into their new family, and they could perform privately amongst friends, but a stage like those Clara frequented was frowned upon.

Either her love for Joseph was strong, or she had deep dissatisfaction with her life as it was, but taking matters into their own hands, Clara one day in early 1864 told her family that she was off to visit her dress maker… and instead eloped with Joseph in Corsham. She would have been around 20, and as such technically too young to marry without a parents’ permission or license, but many young couples at this time fudged their ages slightly, and it was a common practice in the church and registry offices to not probe too hard.

Family stories say that the newly-wed couple’s grand plan was to set up a book shop in Swindon to support their new family. Swindon at this time was still in two parts – Old Swindon (now known as Old Town) at the top of the hill, and New Swindon which was growing around the railway works on the flat land beneath. New Swindon was booming, and it may have seemed an exciting prospect to found a new business. In reality, though they were living in the area for a while, this venture seems to have not lasted very long at all. Clara had her first child, daughter Daisy, in the November of the following year, who was registered in Highworth – a smaller community just to the north – and she was followed eighteen months later by a second daughter named Kate.

A few months after Daisy’ birth there is a mention of one of the final public performances attributed to Clara in the newspapers. She and Joseph appeared together with other members of Corsham musical societies at an annual soiree in April 1866, where she sang and played piano alongside him. This event was repeated in 1868. This may have been just private enough for Clara to appear, as there are other married women on the bill, and they probably needed the money.

By the time her third child – Edith – arrived, in the summer of 1869, Clara and Joseph had made a big change and undertaken a move to Nottingham. This was about 150 miles away from Corsham. She’s mentioned as having done a tiny bit of performing, bumping along at community entertainments, in Nottingham in October of that year.

They’d gone to Nottingham so that Joseph could set himself up as a soda water manufacturer. This industry was experiencing a bit of a boom, as the Victorian temperance movement was growing. Carbonated drinks, like sparking water and ginger beer, had a similar sensation in the mouth as a fermented beverage, but none of the pesky alcohol. They were therefore promoted as a more wholesome alternative, particularly around some non-conformist church movements. Joseph, who called himself an inventor, and in 1871 was employing three men and a woman at his plant near Mansfield Grove in Nottingham, could have made it big with this new business venture.

He didn’t. At some point in the 1870s the manufactory went south. Clara had another baby, Alice Bertha, in July 1871, bringing their quota of small children to four. His business, though it’s unclear exactly when it failed, was not mentioned in the Post Office directory of Nottingham published in 1876.

Instead, to keep their family afloat, they appear to have begun to rely on Clara’s talents as a pianist, which were relatively unknown in Nottingham before this time. Despite the socially uncomfortable issues around married women performing, she took to the stage at an entertainment in April 1872, where the Nottingham Journal reported:

“We ought not, perhaps, to conclude without stating that Mrs Goold, who, we believe, appeared last night for the first time in public as a pianist, in Nottingham, acquitted herself with remarkable efficiency at her instrument in the very difficult music she had to play. We have reason to know that many at the concert will be glad to have an opportunity of hearing her again.”

She was able to build upon this exposure, and by 1881 they’d had five more children – Ernest, Amy, Irene, Stanley and Vivian – had downsized their accommodation quite considerably, and she had established herself as a teacher of music on the Nottingham scene. Her brother Walter also went to Nottingham and worked as a music teacher. On the 1881 census her husband Joseph described himself as a druggist (which was possibly related to his soda water interests) and an author of scientific works. Throughout the 1880s he was contributing to discussions on the construction and pitch of scales in musical publications of the day, and doing work on harmonics and vibrations – which had a basis in maths and physics.

However scholarly and inventive the work, it did not pay the family’s bills. So, Joseph became a book keeper and a clerk, and Clara continued to take in many piano pupils. They moved closer to the newly-opened university college in the city, possibly so Joseph could undertake his research closer to other deep thinkers. It appears that he also occasionally worked as a piano tuner, which would have influenced his research on pitch and harmonics.

As their family grew up, Clara’s daughters joined her in piano teaching to contribute to the family income. Adverts in Nottingham newspapers from the late 1880s promote “Mrs Goold and daughters” who offer piano tuition and children’s singing classes. Joseph also offered classes in music theory and harmony.

Her daughter Kate married young, to an engineer in the Public Works Department in India who whisked her away to a city in the east of that country, but the rest of the children stayed very much at home. By the time of the 1891 census the whole elder portion of the family were referred to as professors of music – so, though she might have wished to escape the role her musical abilities put her in for her entire childhood, Clara’s talents had brought her full circle and were an important far of the family’s financial structure.

Despite their residence and work in Nottingham, Clara and Joseph and their brood seem to have spent considerable time back at home with his family in Wiltshire. It was here that eldest daughter Daisy had got to know a fellow musician, Herbert Spackman, whose family were very prominent in Corsham. She eventually followed him to New Zealand, and married him in Wellington.

At home in Nottingham, Clara had started to take in resident piano pupils to train as her house gradually emptied, though by 1894 only Joseph was being referred to as a music teacher in business and street directories. Her daughter Kate was widowed in Cuttack, India, in 1892, so returned home to Nottingham with her tiny son, and lived with them and taught piano too. They lived at Stratford House, in the town’s Shakespeare Street, and operated as a family-run music school, with their unmarried daughters coming and going, and adding to their pupil capacity for the next thirty years or so. Clara’s talents, which she passed on in abundance, kept the household solvent and operating well.

Joseph invented a harmonograph around 1901, which was published in a book on harmonic vibration and vibration figures in 1909. This was a twin elliptic pendulum which generated Lissajous curves – a graph of a system of parametric equations. This was his only published research or invention after many years working in harmonics. So, though he was working, the family seems to have relied very much on the solid skills of Clara’s abilities to maintain their livelihood.

Daughter Kate remarried in 1905, Daisy eventually had three daughters (including Heather Muriel Spackman, who later became Heather Tanner), Irene became a governess and Amy became a school teacher, but Edith and Bertha mostly stayed at home for the duration and taught piano alongside their parents. Son Vivian seemed to swap careers as often as his father did, taking in mechanical engineering and being a nurseryman, but eventually settled on architecture. Her two other sons both took up religion, but while Stanley was a reverend in Nottingham and later Suffolk, Ernest had been a schoolteacher at first but then moved on to the church in South Africa.

A 1905 advert in the Nottingham Guardian promotes Clara and Herbert’s music teaching in piano, singing, organ and harmony, and says that they’re working alongside one of their daughters – though it isn’t specific which, and could have been Alice or Bertha. They also say that they’re a school for the “Virgil Clavier technique”, which was a way of improving piano fingering by practicing silently so as not to disturb the neighbours.

In 1916, Clara’s father died in Bath. John Henry MacFarlane was described as “Bath’s Oldest Musician” in his obituary in the Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, which described some of his teaching methods in the words of his old pupils. He reputedly would rap pupils on the knuckles with a stick if the scales were played wrong or someone sang a flat for a sharp. Although nothing out of the ordinary for music teaching in this era, Clara must also have been subjected to this treatment as a child. It is not known if it was a technique she used herself with her own piano pupils, but it seems likely. The obituary also reveals that Clara had come to be with her father until the end of his life.

Their grandson, son of their daughter Kate, was killed on active service during the First World War. He had been an officer.

Clara and Joseph remained in Nottingham until around 1922/3, when they retired back to Corsham. They celebrated their diamond wedding anniversary at the residence of their son-in-law Herbert Spackman, at Rose Cottage in Priory Street, and the occasion was reported upon in the Wiltshire Times. They appear to have moved in with Daisy and Herbert and their family so they could be taken care of in old age.

Joseph died, aged 90, in Corsham in 1926, and was celebrated in the newspapers as a musician and scientist/inventor. Typically for the time, his obituaries only mention the occupations of his sons and not his daughters, and do not even mention Clara by name – she is just “the widow”.

After Joseph’s death, Clara is known to have lived quietly in Corsham during her retirement and widowhood, occasionally helping out her daughters in their piano teaching.

When Clara died in the summer of 1939, she was given a glowing obituary in both Nottingham and Wiltshire Newspapers. The Nottingham Journal describes her as “one of Nottingham’s foremost pianoforte and singing teachers in pre-war days, and among her pupils were many men and women who have since become famous in the world of music”, but doesn’t actually name any of them. She was remembered as the teacher of piano teacher Alice Hogg, who was well-known in Nottingham at that time.

Her two piano-teacher daughters continued to educate the children of Corsham on keyboards through the 20^th century, so her musical legacy is still felt in the town today. But of her remaining grand-children, it is Heather Muriel Spackman, later Heather Tanner, who is the best known – she was a writer and author, and a peace campaigner.

Gertrude Luce’s story

Many towns across the British Isles had Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) auxiliary hospitals in the run up to and during the first world war, usually voluntarily staffed by a large collection of respectable women from the area. These were invariably the wives and daughters of successful businessmen, professionals and gentry, who were doing their bit for the war effort by caring for and nursing trainloads of wounded soldiers brought directly from the battlefields.

Though women of these social classes had often volunteered for good causes for the benefit of their town during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the establishment of the VADs was one of the first times this had been done in an organised manner. The mobilisation of this large group of women also helped to challenge the social idea that respectable women shouldn’t really work, even if these roles were actually voluntary.

These hospitals were run by a “Commandant”, a woman or man who had taken charge of the whole local organisation, and in Malmesbury’s case this was Miss (Emily) Gertrude Luce. At the time the first world war began, she was around 43, unmarried, and living at The Knoll on the outskirts of the town.

Nearby, other women of similar social class to Gertrude took on the commandant role for their town’s VAD. Devizes’ auxiliary hospital was run by Daisy (actually Margaret Emily) Thornely, wife of a solicitor based at a big house at Nursteed. Daisy, who was of British parentage but actually born in Germany, was only the second woman in Wiltshire to raise a VAD. Melksham’s VAD was run by Mabel Fuller of Great Chalfield Manor, dairy farmer and wife of the manager of the town’s Avon India Rubber company. Commandant Helena Wilson, of the Chippenham VAD auxiliary hospital, was the wife of a doctor and town councillor and lived in the town’s picturesque St Mary Street. She lost all three of her sons during the war. Lady Ethel Christian Methuen of Corsham Court served as Corsham VAD’s commandant.

So, against this background, Gertrude Luce seems to have been a fairly typical example of a VAD commandant. However, she seems to have gone above and beyond the normal expectations of this role, taking on many more duties and auspices than were expected. Each public role she took upon seems to have been laced with kindness, and a compassionate desire to help the underprivileged and society for the better, and for this she stands out as remarkable.

Gertrude was born in Malmesbury in September 1871, the eldest child of William Hollis Luce Esq, and Emily (Milly) Sopwith, who had married in London the year before. She gained two sisters in quick succession, followed by a brother who died in infancy. The family was completed by another brother, a sister, and a youngest brother.

In the run up to his marriage, and Gertrude’s birth, her father had been an agent for tea import and export business Dent and Co. in Foochow, China. Today, known as Fuzhou, the city is capital of Fujian province in South East China. There had been a British colonial presence in the city since at least 1846, with it becoming an important Protestant missionary base – and therefore a good place to establish a tea exportation business. Though initially from Malmesbury, he had been living and working in Fuzhou since the 1850s.

Westerners involved in the Chinese tea trade in the 19th century

Dent and Co had reduced their operations there in 1869, which may have been his impetus to return to London. He retained property interest in the area though, alongside investments elsewhere. Gertrude’s mother Milly, 20 years his junior, had also spent time in China, which is presumably where she had met William Hollis Luce. Milly was known to have had a keen interest in Oriental embroidery which she had brought back from the far east.

William Hollis Luce’s prominence in Fuzhou led to Gertrude’s birth being reported upon in the London and China Telegraph, alongside that of her sisters Jane in 1873 and Ursula in 1875. Her ill-fated brother’s birth was announced in the North Wiltshire Herald in 1876, and his namesake Thomas’s birth the following year.

The family lived at The Knoll, at Burton Hill, where William Hollis worked as a magistrate and justice of the peace. His family had had the house built, by his father Thomas Luce – a banker who had operated on Malmesbury High Street and also at the Bank of London, and later served as an MP.

The Knoll in Malmesbury as it currently appears

In addition to Gertrude’s brother Thomas, she had two more siblings – Amy in 1878, and William in 1880. They seem to have enjoyed a comfortable childhood, with a large house that had been modernised in the 1870s, and various servants to look after them.

One incident, involving Gertrude’s sister Ursula, made the newspapers and shines a light upon the sort of childhood she and her siblings had. Ursula, with sisters Gertrude and Jane, was out walking in a meadow with their governess Miss Beames in the July of 1880, when she tripped in long grass and fell into a river. Their governess attempted to rescue the little girl, but found the water too deep. The shouting of Gertrude and Jane alerted some men working nearby, who were able to save Ursula. She was brought home, unconscious, and was attended by Doctor Kinneir who succeeded in reviving her. However, while this was going on, another child elsewhere succumbed to the effects of drowning for want of the same doctor.

The 1881 census reveals Governess Beames to have actually been Maria Somme, who had been born in Prussia. She would have had charge of the formal education of Gertrude, Jane and Ursula, with Thomas, Amy and William in the care of the two nursemaids also employed by the household. The servants of The Knoll were completed by a butler, cook, two housemaids and a kitchen-maid.

As the family grew up, the boys would have been sent away to school – Clifton College in Bristol, reportedly – while the girls continued to be educated at home. They were known to have holidayed at Tenby in Pembrokeshire in the summer of 1886, as they are listed in the notable arrivals column of the Tenby Observer.

As was expected of a young woman of her class and background, Gertrude made her formal debut into society in January 1889, at the age of 18. Her mother held a ball for her at The Knoll, where she wore “a simple dress of white embroidered tulle trimmed with snowdrops” according to the publication John Bull. Other young women from nearby families were invited, including Muriel Howard of Charlton Park, later Lady Coventry, who wore white tulle with a broad pink sash.

Gertrude would have worn a dress similar to this when making her debut

However, the expected outcome of a debut should have been an eventual marriage proposal, and this does not appear to have been the case for Gertrude. The 1891 census has her aged 19 and unmarried, still living at The Knoll, and the 1901 census is no different. Whether she remained unmarried was by design or a lack of opportunity is not remarked upon by any available document. This lack of marriage, and therefore the formal household duties as a wife, may have been an impetus for her to turn her energies towards worthy public works, and those less privileged than her.

Her youngest brother William was killed at Diamond Hill in the conflict in South Africa in 1900, and a window dedicated to him at Malmesbury Abbey the following year. Though there was another older son – Thomas – who had been given the education and societal trappings expected of a young man of his class (for example, he was given the freedom of the city of London as a member of the Girdlers’ Company, like his father before him, in 1903), he went out to Ceylon – now Sri Lanka – on business and then farmed in Shropshire. The absence of her younger brothers may have further strengthened Gertrude’s position as the oldest child, particularly representing her family in the local community.

The William Scott Luce window at Malmesbury Abbey

Alongside her sisters, who also never married, the Miss Luce name is scattered across local organisations across Malmesbury. Jane Luce was involved in choral competitions as the honourable secretary of the Wiltshire Arts and Crafts Association, chair of the local branch of the Women’s Conservative Association, and later district commissioner for the girl guides. Amy Luce organised waste paper collection as part of the war effort during the First World War. Ursula Luce was active in town dramatic and musical events.

The Government’s decision to organise Voluntary Aid Detachments in case of future conflicts seems to have become a turning point for Gertrude’s life, and it is at this point she becomes extremely visible in the public life of Malmesbury.

She raised the VAD in Malmesbury soon after 1909, after the Army Council had published the Scheme for Voluntary Aid. These guidelines stipulated that the women’s detachment should have a male or female Commandant, a male or female Quartermaster, a female superintendent or matron – who should be a trained nurse – and then twenty other female members, at least four of which should be qualified in cooking. Male detachments had different rules, and were larger. Once 70 per cent of the required members had been registered, and had begun training, the detachment could be registered. Gertrude’s detachment was the 22^nd of such in Wiltshire.

In March 1912, having been ill for a while, Gertrude’s father died. He was 90 years old. He was buried at Malmesbury Abbey, with Gertrude and two of her sisters (Ursula is not mentioned in reports) and her brother in attendance. Milly Luce was now ipso facto in charge of the household at The Knoll, but in practice the role seems to have fallen to Gertrude. He left over £61,000, of which each of his children received £200 initially with the rest staying with Gertrude’s mother Milly for her life, and then the remainder would be equally shared.

Despite Gertrude having initially raised the Voluntary Area Detachment, when the First World War was actually declared in August 1914 Eleanor Countess of Suffolk offered up space at Charlton Park for an auxiliary hospital, so was initially Commandant of this Charlton detachment, and Gertrude’s Malmesbury detachment joined this effort along with the VADs from Crudwell.

Charlton Park, near Malmesbury

When the countess went to join her husband in India in October 1915, the Charlton Park ward closed and organisation fell again to Gertrude.

As Commandant of the Auxiliary Hospital effort, all major decisions would have fallen to Gertrude, though she would not have been in charge of medical and nursing services – as those would have fallen to doctors and the matron respectively. The hospital matron was Martha Alice Mary Wellicome, who was awarded a Royal Red Cross by the King after the war was over.

Gertrude would have made the important decisions about how the hospital worked day-to-day, and how her staff were deployed. The volunteer nurses at her hospital were local women, usually those well-off enough to not have to work for their living, and therefore have time to spare, and may have felt that working at an auxiliary hospital was an easier commitment to make to the war effort than full training and deployment at a military hospital under the Red Cross. These nurses also included her sisters Jane, Ursula and Amy, but they would not have had special treatment as formality was part of the hospital remit.

Her detachment staff would each have volunteered for a number of hours a week, and all have undergone Red Cross training, which included first aid (for example bandaging and wound care), home nursing, hygiene and cookery, and Gertrude would have taken part in this too. Some of this may have taken place on a hospital ward, and other training in halls designated training centres. Their duties would have included domestic duties like sweeping, dusting, polishing, cleaning, washing crockery, sorting linen and any nursing duties allotted by the matron. There would have also been laundry and food preparation duties under the head cooks, along with food service.

The patients coming in to be treated at Gertrude’s hospital would have arrived by train as the need arose. They would not have had life-threatening injuries, so instead needed convalescent time which the hospital could provide. Often these wards could be quite lively, with games and songs for the recovering soldiers, concerts performed by townspeople, and trips out as the patients’ health improved.

The Malmesbury VAD ward during World War 1. One of Gertrude’s sisters is in the picture.

Away from her hospital duties at this time, Gertrude was also head of the executive committee for welcoming Belgian refugees when they arrived in Malmesbury in 1915. This raised money to help the local community to support these people in need, as more than 250,000 Belgians were displaced over the course of the war due to fierce fighting in their country and were placed in communities all over the country. In March 1915 Gertrude released an official statement, which was partially published in the North Wilts Herald:

“Thirteen more Belgians have arrived in Malmesbury, bringing the total up to 24. Three of these are at Cole Park Stables, four at the Iron Foundry, three lodging with Mr Withynian, King’s House, and three in a cottage in Holloway, taken by the committee. They are all most grateful for the hospitality shown them. Some of them have undergone great hardships in their journey from Belgium, one woman and her sons arriving in Malmesbury in only the clothes they wore, and these badly torn by barbed wire entanglements. They, with other refugees, had to walk eleven hours on end, groping their way under hedges and in ditches – sometimes up to their knees in water – in terror of being seen and shot at by the Germans. This woman has a son fighting, as is the husband of one of the other women. The committee have again gone carefully into the subject of expense, and find that the allowance made at Headquarters is the same as they had fixed on – viz., 10s per head per week for adults. They have also found, on investigating other cases where the cost of maintenance has been seemingly a good deal less, that in those cases the cost has not included coal or meat or other big items of the weekly budget… The villages of Oaksey, Little Somerford, Luckington, Brinkworth and Dauntsey have stopped payment for the present and the other villages are sending a reduced amount until the need for more arises, but the committee much hope that there will not be a great falling off, and would point out that the balance at the bank was largely made up of generous donations in lump sums of £20 or £25, this being in place of a weekly subscription. The calculation as to the number of refugees to be accommodated in Malmesbury was made upon this basis, and if the promised weekly subscriptions are now discontinued it will obviously be necessary, either to reduce that number or to curtail the period for which they can be provided for. In view of the uncertainty as to the possibly duration of the war, either alternative would be most regrettable.”

In response to the need for more beds for wounded soldiers, both from Britain and allies, as commandant Gertrude took charge of the Cottage Hospital in Malmesbury in July 1916 on behalf of the Red Cross. On top of this she organised new wards at Cranmore House – at this point the YMCA headquarters – and in Malmesbury’s Wesleyan Chapel. Burton Hill Manor House, located close to Gertrude’s home at The Knoll, was also offered as hospital space by owner Colonel Miles in 1917. This opened up many more beds for wounded personnel.

Gertrude, along with 39 other women who were VAD auxiliary hospital commandants, was awarded an OBE in the King’s Birthday Honours in June 1918. She had not known in advance that her name had been put forward for an award, and was apparently overwhelmed at both the recognition and a surprise parade held at the hospital in her honour.

The parade for Gertrude’s OBE, with her in the centre of the middle line in a square hat.

Around her, other commandants were being awarded too. Mabel Fuller, commandant of Melksham VAD was given an OBE at the same time as Gertrude. Daisy Thornely, commandant of Devizes VAD, received hers in the 1918 New Years Honours, alongside 46 other auxiliary commandants. Helena Wilson, commandant of Chippenham VAD, received an OBE in the 1919 New Year’s Honours. These awards to commandants continued into the early 1920s. So, while a great honour to be recognised for her good work during the war, Gertrude was by no means unique in being awarded a title.

When the extra wards closed in June 1919, and the Red Cross relinquished control of the Cottage Hospital, the Malmesbury VAD, with Gertrude at their head, had treated 778 wartime casualties. More awards were also on the table for members of the VAD for their work. Red Cross awards were given in April 1922 at Bowood House, for women who had given over 1,000 hours. Lady Lansdowne of Bowood gave out signed photographs as her personal thanks.

The closure of the hospital, and her OBE award, did not mean that Gertrude’s role as Commandant came to an end. She remained in the position with the Voluntary Aid Detachment until the late 1920s. This seems characteristic of the kindness and drive towards improving the world for the better that shines through all reports of Gertrude’s activities.

The official record for Gertrude, and her sisters, on the 1921 census belies all these public works and energy that the family seem to have been renowned for locally. Gertrude, Jane and Ursula are recorded as not occupied for a living, while sister Amy is tersely credited with house duties as her occupation. They were all still living at The Knoll with their mother Milly and a complement of staff – a nurse, two ladies’ maids, a cook, two housemaids, a parlourmaid and a kitchen maid. The need for a butler and footman appears to have gone from the household with the death of their father. Alongside the public service work the sisters performed from the town, they almost certainly enjoyed the society life and socialising that their class afforded them. Gertrude’s sister Amy is known to have ridden out with the Beaufort Hunt.

In 1925, Gertrude’s 47-year-old brother Thomas died in his sleep on a visit to London. Like his sisters and younger brother, he had never married, so the bulk of the family’s wealth and property now fell to Gertrude as the eldest child. Tom was buried at Malmesbury Abbey.

Malmesbury Abbey (Getty Images)

By at least 1925, on the basis of her previous connections and good works, Gertrude was regularly sitting as a magistrate for Malmesbury. In the early years of her service she is mentioned as sitting on the bench, in cases such as a habitual bicycle thief, but later into the 1930s she was pronouncing judgements. Such cases included remanding a man found in the bedroom of a daughter of a local landlord. In later years she was also a justice of the peace, and chaired the juvenile court. Malmesbury Museum also says that she was a county and district councillor, but when this occurred has not come to light, and a governor of the town secondary school for 25 years.

The late 1920s saw Gertrude take on a yet another new role, as “Lady Visitor of Institutions for Defectives in Wiltshire”. Clumsily worded even for the time, this was an appointment under the provisions of the Mental Deficiency Act 1913 to oversee care for those with mental health issues in the county at the time. Gertrude would therefore have had an official remit to visit places like the County Asylum at Devizes, and advise on the care of the patients. She wasn’t alone in this remit though, as this was alongside Mrs M Kennedy-Shaw of Teffont Magna near Salisbury, and Miss Helen Boulton of Seend.

She relinquished the role of Commandant of the 22^nd Wiltshire VAD in the late 1920s, and a Miss Simmons took over the job. It seems that there were other calls on her time and expertise by this point, which may have meant re-evaluating how she gave out her skills. However, she remained involved as the organisation’s president until the late 1940s, attending meetings, training and exhibitions of their skills.

Gertrude was appointed a member of the Chippenham Area Guardians Committee in 1930, replacing Canon Westlake, who had just died. The Chippenham Area Board of Guardians had initially just been in charge of the Chippenham workhouse, but in 1930 legislation had just been passed to rename it the Chippenham Institution and the change happened that March. Malmesbury workhouse on Sherston Road then became part of the Chippenham area as a result of this reorganisation, and since Gertrude was so deeply involved in the public life of Malmesbury this would seem to have been an obvious appointment. On this committee she joined her former debutant partner of 41 years earlier, Lady Coventry, formerly Muriel Howard.

Gertrude’s mother Milly Luce died in the early summer of 1932, meaning that she was now head of the family. Five years later, her sister Jane also died, aged 65. Jane left over £21,000, including bequests to colonialism-friendly organisations the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Gertrude was an executor, as was one of their cousins.

In the run up to the Second World War she had chaired the local branch of the Air Raids Precaution Committee, and when war was actually declared in September 1939 she was again actively involved in public works and efforts to make the situation better for those more directly affected. Gertrude and remaining sisters Amy and Ursula took in a group of evacuees from London, who can be seen with the family and their servants at The Knoll on the 1939 register.

However, while much attention is paid to the children removed from London to escape the threat of bombs and air raids, The Knoll’s new occupants were considerably older. Gertrude’s evacuees were a group of mature blind women from the East End of London, removed for their vulnerability and trouble reaching a safe space in the event of an attack. This was deliberately part of Operation Pied Piper, though a section of the population that has received less coverage.

The five blind women that Gertrude and her sisters supported all appear to have come from less prosperous areas of London, and none were declared blind on earlier documents so were probably gathered together by officials rather than hailing from an institution. Widowed Elizabeth Neighbour was the eldest, at 83, and hailed from Poplar; Jewish Sarah Marks, married to Abraham who was a fish porter in Spittalfields Market, was next youngest at 67, had been born in Whitechapel and was accompanied by one of her sighted daughters for extra support; Kate Simmons, 62, was a former cigar maker from St Botolph who was widowed from fruit merchant Charles; Jessie Roper, 59, was from Bow and had been a single mother that had bounced in and out of various workhouses; and youngest was Ada Rogers, 51, another workhouse-frequenting single mother, who came from Bethnal Green.

Women in the East End of London around the time of the Second World War

It’s unknown how long this group of women spent in Malmesbury, as, like the evacuated children who went home when the expected air raids didn’t immediately materialise, they may have returned to London after a few months. And if they were evacuated again when the blitz properly began in 1940 they may have gone elsewhere. However, their housing at The Knoll in 1939 is typical of the compassionate response that Gertrude and her sisters seems to have been known for locally, and the big house afforded their guests the comforts of six servants too.

The Voluntary Aid Detachments did exist during the Second World War, but did not really run hospitals in the same way that they had during the previous conflict, so Gertrude would have been involved in their work in a different way as their president. She continued to visit hospitals for the mentally ill during the war and into the late 1940s, and there are a couple of mentions of the household advertising for new staff during the war too, including a female gardener. Gertrude and her sisters also hosted community events in their garden.

The Luce sisters seem to have gradually withdrawn from public life over the 1950s, and were getting elderly. Gertrude died in December 1962, at the age of 91, and was buried at Tetbury Hill Cemetery in Malmesbury. Ursula died in 1965, and Amy followed in 1967.

Since none of the siblings had married or had children, the ownership of The Knoll passed back up to cousins descended from Gertrude’s father’s brother. They decided to sell the property rather than keep it, and it was converted into a hotel over the next few years. It operated as a hotel until around 2014, and has since been converted into multiple domestic occupation.

References

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Devizes and Wilts Advertiser, Thursday 15 July 1880, Malmesbury

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North Wilts Herald, Friday 13 May 1938, Second housemaid of two wanted

North Wilts Herald, Friday 18 November 1938, Wilts Police Officer: Inspector Sloper Retiring, loss to Malmesbury

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The Queen, Saturday 4 March 1899, A loan collection of needlework…

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Tenby Observer, Thursday 1 July 1886, Arrivals

UK 1871 census, held by Ancestry.co.uk

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Warminster & Westbury journal, and Wilts County Advertiser, Saturday 16 November 1907, Wilts Arts and Crafts Association

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Western Daily Press, Friday 21 March 1930, Beauford Hunt Member Fined

Western Daily Press – Friday 5 February 1937, Malmesbury Licensing Report

Western Daily Press, Friday 17 September 1937, Death at Malmesbury of Miss J. B. Luce

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Western Daily Press, Wednesday 8 October 1969, Lorry was a danger

Western Daily Press, Monday 10 August 1987 £4.7m in hotel sales boom

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Wiltshire Times and Trowbridge Advertiser, Saturday 2 May 1925, Malmesbury. Funeral of the late Mr T. S. Luce

Wiltshire Times and Trowbridge Advertiser, 16 April 1927, Official Notices: Wilts to wit

Wiltshire Times and Trowbridge Advertiser, Saturday 5 October 1929, Official Notices: Wilts to wit

Wiltshire Times and Trowbridge Advertiser, Saturday 22 November 1930 Miss E, G, Luce O.B.E….

Wiltshire Times and Trowbridge Advertiser, Saturday 11 June 1932, Death of Mrs M Luce. Well known Malmesbury resident.

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Jane G’s story

Jane had lost not only her husband when he ran off with a barmaid, but also her own identity when her husband’s lover claimed her name on the 1851 census in a vain attempt at respectability. She later brought one of the first civil divorce cases against him, after a new act was passed in 1857 enabling women to do so for the first time.

You could be forgiven for thinking that nothing had happened between Jane and her husband Charles, since she seemingly appears alongside him and their children in West Ham in 1851. However, the actual Jane filed for divorce from Charles in 1858, and says in her paperwork that he’d left her in 1841 – which makes the woman with him in 1851 his lover Elizabeth, and not Jane at all. So Jane actually appears on that census twice – once fake, and once with information she’d given the enumerator herself.

Fovant, in Wiltshire

Jane was born in Fovant in around 1806, and had married Charles Shore in 1828 in Stockton – where she’d moved to during her childhood. Stockton lies close to the River Wylve in Wiltshire, between Warminster and Salisbury, while Fovant sits further south. Both were small rural communities. She is likely the daughter of James Goodfellow, a carpenter who died while she was still quite young, and Rhoda, nee Matthews. Her father’s death seems to have put the family – Rhoda and Jane’s siblings Hester, James, John, Mary, Elizabeth and Martha – close to the poverty line, as her mother subsequently gives her occupation as a pauper on early census returns.

Stockton, in 1910

Moving over to Stockton and subsequently marrying Charles must have seemed a bit of a step up for Jane. Charles came from Heytesbury, also relatively close by, and his father was a mason. They lived at Stockton for eight years after their marriage, while Charles worked as a farm labourer, and then moved to Trowbridge for him to run a carrying business between that town and Salisbury, and to subsequently run a pub. Much of this detail comes from Jane’s divorce petition, submitted in 1858, which fills in a great deal of the back story.

The likely pub premises, as they’re where Jane was living on the 1841 census, was the Brewery Tap on Back Street in Trowbridge, now long-since defunct, and probably serving Ushers ales, as the brewery was nearby. In all likelihood, though Charles would have been the landlord and held the licence on paper, it would probably have been Jane that did the day-to-day running of the pub. This situation was relatively common among landlords and landladies of pubs at the time.

The probable location of Jane’s pub, from the OS map taken in 1884.

The 1841 census, taken around a month after Charles deserted Jane, finds her still in the pub premises, with a new barmaid and a five-year-old girl, also called Jane though bearing Jane’s maiden surname. Jane states in her divorce petition that she’d had no children with Charles, so it’s likely that the younger Jane was a niece, the daughter of one of her many siblings, who partially fulfilled a child role in the couple. It’s relatively common to find niblings being brought up by their aunts – sometimes due to economic necessity, as that would be one less mouth for the parents to feed, but also sometimes passed over to childless couples, perhaps as a kindness in a society where motherhood was seen as a perfect state for women.

Trowbridge, around the time Jane lived there.

When the 1851 census was taken, Jane had given up the pub and had moved to Bath with her niece, where she was making a living as a nurse. This would not have been a nurse in a hospital during this era, but more someone who went into people’s houses to care for them if they were sick, or incapacitated after childbirth or an accident. It would have not been the most lucrative profession, but would have given her enough to live on. She more often worked as a monthly nurse. This was someone who cared for a woman in the final stages of pregnancy and through the birth, and lived in different households for a month at a time. She also probably did some of the chores of the household while the woman was lying in.

No photo exists of Jane, but this civil war era American nurse would have dressed very similarly to her when she was working as a nurse. Uniforms would not have been worn.

In contrast, Fake Jane, aka Elizabeth, was living with Jane’s husband Charles and two children in West Ham, where Charles was working as an engine driver on the railway. In addition to their own two children, Elizabeth had also taken in a nursechild, which meant that she’d probably lost a baby in the preceding year, but had taken in another child who needed her breastmilk. The reason for the deception of Elizabeth using Jane’s name on the official document was probably to do with respectability, as she was posing as his wife to all intents and purposes, but they perhaps feared some retribution on a legal document, as the census was. Therefore, she used the name Jane rather than Elizabeth. It’s probable that Jane never knew of this deception.

The real census entry for Jane in 1851.

The fraudulent entry for Jane in 1851.

Jane’s plea for divorce, filed on 8^th November 1858, was only the second divorce case from Wiltshire under the new 1857 act, (the first was Amelia Willett, in February 1858), and was a straight plea for the marriage to end.

There was a major overhaul in divorce law in parliament in 1857. This was partly brought about by the campaigning of Caroline Norton, who (finally) received a blue plaque for her efforts in 2021. The Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 brought divorce into the civil courts, and out of the realms of the church. It also meant that for the first time women could bring divorce proceedings, or seek ways out of the legal trappings of a marriage, which is what more what Caroline Norton wanted. And this enabled Jane to seek recompense for what had happened to her.

Under the Act, which came into force on 1 January 1858, men could achieve a divorce by just proving their wife had had an affair. Women had to prove their husband’s adultery, in addition to something else he’d done wrong: either extreme cruelty, desertion, bigamy or incest. Marriages were also ended by nullity – in most cases a previous marriage which had been “forgotten” to be declared, but occasionally impotence. The Divorce and Matrimonial Court didn’t just hear the ends of marriages either – either party could apply for a judicial separation, which mean that they were still legally married, but didn’t have to live together. This was often used by women who couldn’t prove adultery but wanted to avoid flying fists. Either party could also petition the court under the act for restoration of conjugal rights, therefore forcing their partner to live with them again.

Women could also apply to protect any independent earnings they’d made since their husband’s desertion, and the first of the two earliest Wiltshire cases was one of these, filed by Amelia Willett (née Philpott) of Market Lavington in late February 1858.

Jane’s story, from the case files, was a straight plea for the marriage to end on the grounds of adultery and desertion. She says that he ran off with the bar maid Elizabeth Doughty and went to live in Vauxhall, where she passed as his wife. He hadn’t contributed anything to Jane’s upkeep since. She had discovered that they’d lived under the surname Grant, and they’d run an eating house together, but had subsequently moved to Portsmouth.

The case, which was uncontested by Charles, was sent for trial in December, and the minutes were filed in May 1859. There is no definite sign of the verdict, either in the file or the newspapers, but it’s likely that Jane could have won. She may also have run out of money to remain in London and pursue the claim – divorce could be expensive, particularly before the verdict, as the claimant would have had to have funded the proceedings themselves before any costs were awarded in judgement.

Like many people in her position, she had moved to London to be closer to the courts while the legal proceedings were heard. She lived at Bloomsbury, in lodgings on Southampton Street, while the trial was being heard, but afterwards returned to Wiltshire. The time the legal proceedings took – other divorce papers have lawyer’s lackeys sent to hunt down the defendants, to get their answers to the divorce petitions. It may be, if Charles and Elizabeth called themselves Grant, that they were unable to be found. The case was ordered by the judge to be heard via oral testimony in court in 1859, and then there is no further record.

Bloomsbury in London, from the Illustrated London News of 1850

Whatever happened, Jane returned to her previous nursing life afterwards. The 1861 census has her caring for the rector’s wife in Dunkerton, Somerset, a bit south of Bath, who had a month old baby. Ten years later, the 1871 census has her visiting a friend on Conigre in Trowbridge, round the corner from her former pub, though she was still working as a nurse.

After that she disappears from view, and probably was mis-recorded in her death record as she would most likely have been living in someone else’s house when death occurred and they would not have had her full details to bury her properly. Someone bearing her name was buried in Bishop’s Lavington, now West Lavington, in 1884, but this would appear to be someone else who had lived there for years and not the Jane we are looking for.

Charles and Elizabeth never seem to have married, however, which could also indicate that Jane’s petition failed. Elizabeth Doughty might have pretended to be Jane on the 1851 census, but used her own name afterwards. She and Charles had at least five daughters together, and moved to Portsmouth where Charles still worked as a railway engine driver. He later ran a horse drawn taxi cab around Portsmouth, but he appears to have stayed faithful to Elizabeth for the rest of his life. He died in Portsea Island in 1881.

The humble professions of Charles and Jane should hopefully help to dispel the idea that divorce in this period was a preserve of the rich. They certainly weren’t. Jane would have saved enough money from her work to afford the legal fees, while waiting for the legislation to be put in place for her divorce case to be heard. Pauper cases were also heard, although they were rarer.

Without the information given in the legal files, a very different picture of this couple could have emerged. We would have had no way of discerning what had caused the split, and could have thought Jane had gone to Vauxhall with Charles, since Elizabeth used her name. Her divorce case gives her back her truth and her history.

Margaret Griffin’s story

Margaret played a vital role in search and rescue during the Second World War, saving the lives of 21 people when she and her working dogs managed to locate them in the rubble of the doodlebug blitz. Training dogs to find buried people was an incredibly new (and incredibly dangerous) thing in the 1940s, and Margaret was at the forefront of this practice – and even was awarded a gong for bravery.

Margaret, in about 1913

Co-incidentally, a house she spent some of her early life living in later played an important part in saving people’s lives too, although long after she left. Rowden Hill House, just beneath Chippenham’s Hospital, was accommodation for nursing staff in the 1960s and 1970s, and is now in need of some tender loving care itself. Margaret lived there with her family from before 1909 until late 1913, but also lived in the USA, New Zealand and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

She wasn’t born in Chippenham, however. She was born down the Great Western Road in Marlborough in 1889, the second of three daughters of Robert (Bob) Chaloner Critchley Long and Maud Johnson. Her father Bob, sometimes given as a gentleman and at other times given as a brewer and wine merchant, was a younger son of a Welsh MP, albeit one with a long family heritage of landowning in Wiltshire, and thus had no title and few expectations than his elder brother, but went into the army as well as running a brewing business.

Margaret’s older sister Muriel was born in Berkshire, while her younger sister Joan came along while the family were in Devon, so it sounds like the family were quite mobile. By 1901, they were in a large house, Ludford Park, in Shropshire. This was a timbered property, dating from around the early 17^th century, and sat on a river bank just south of Ludlow. Here the household had ten servants, including a governess to educate Margaret and her sisters.

Two views of Ludford House in Shropshire

While Margaret’s uncle Walter became an MP like her grandfather, held seven different constituencies over 41 years and spent 16 years as a cabinet minister, her father Bob also had some political ambitions. To that end, he bought Rowden Hill House in Chippenham at some point before 1909, and campaigned to be the Conservative and Unionist Party MP for West Wiltshire (at that time you did not need to live in your constituency) for the first 1910 general election, held in January.

This meant that Margaret and her sister Joan moved into Rowden Hill House (elder sister Muriel had married a few years earlier), and became involved in campaigning for their father’s victory. In Margaret’s case, that meant becoming part of the local branch of the Women’s Unionist and Tariff Reform Association.

Rowden Hill House in Chippenham, now in a state of disrepair

This group, from the days before women could vote, were a way some women could get involved in politics and have an influence on the way men voted. The Tariff Reform League, of which they were an offshoot, formed in 1903, was effectively a pressure group promoting British empire industry and products over those imported from elsewhere. The Unionist part of their name meant that they opposed home rule in Ireland. These values were extremely popular and aligned with the Conservative party, who at the time were known as the Conservative and Unionist party. One of the key tenets of the Women’s Unionist and Tariff Reform Association was that women’s engagement in political life was vital, both as citizens and as consumers of goods. This was part of a wider evolving of thought which was part of the process of women gaining a vote.

Despite Margaret’s involvement, her father did not win the West Wiltshire seat in January 1910, and did not stand again in the subsequent general election in December 1910, which was called to attempt to pass a mandate.

The family stayed at Rowden Hill House despite the end of her father’s political career, though it appears that he and his wife moved around in subsequent years. Margaret, aged 22, and her sister Joan were living at Rowden Hill on the 1911 census, with a houseful of servants. Neither of them has any profession given, and their parents aren’t at home.

From a 1900 advert offering the property to let, the house at that time had four reception rooms, servants’ accommodation, thirteen bed and dressing rooms, stables, a coach house, a gardener’s cottage and even two orchards.

This would seem slightly excessive for a family of four at the time, but a large house would have projected their monied status within the community, and room for entertaining and house parties was an essential part of life for people who moved in their circles.

An announcement of Margaret’s impending marriage was made in the society papers in March 1911 when she was 22. Her intended was Andrew Reynold Uvedale Corbett, of Crabwell Hall in Cheshire.

For whatever reason, this marriage did not take place. Andrew never married, and instead became an antique dealer in Hampshire. The end of the engagement got a quiet mention in The Gentlewoman in March 1912.

Margaret’s family remained at Rowden Hill until late 1913, when Robert and Maud moved them to Northcliffe House, just outside Bradford on Avon. It was from this house that Margaret actually did get married, in January 1914. Her new husband was Jack Giffard, a member of a prestigious family from Lockeridge, near Marlborough.

Margaret at the time of her wedding announcement in 1914

Jack was serving with the Royal Horse Artillery at the time, and as such might have expected to see action when the First World War began later that year. He was promoted to Captain that October, and does appear to have been involved in the early part of the conflict, even winning the Légion d’Honneur, as part of the British Expeditionary Force – but after his twin brother was killed in action in the first autumn of the war he seems to have stepped back a little from active duty.

Instead, he was specially employed by the war office from 1915. Margaret had their first daughter, Violet, in 1915, when they were living at Long Ashton just south of Bristol. She was pregnant with their next daughter – Sybelle – when Jack was sent to the USA on war business of the Anglo-Russian sub-committee in the Autumn of 1915, without her. Sybelle entered the world in Charlton in Kent in April 1916, presumably close to where Jack had been garrisoned before he left the country. She was then baptised near Marlborough, as Margaret had presumably brought her daughters back to Jack’s family in Wiltshire for support caring for them while her husband was away.

In June 1916, around two months after giving birth to Sybelle, Margaret arrived in New York to reunite with Jack. Neither baby Sybelle nor toddler Violet went with her, so they were cared for elsewhere. She spent two years in New York with Jack, and they arrived back after the war was over, in December 1918, with a third baby – Jacqueline – in tow.

Her mother died near Melksham in the early months of 1919, which may have been the reason Margaret and Jack hastened back to England. Later that year, Margaret and Jack purchased Shurnhold House at Melksham, perhaps intending it to be their family home.

In reality though, it appears Jack spent very little time there as he’s given as going back and forth to New York on ships over the next couple of years, and by the time the 1921 census was taken Margaret and Jack’s daughters were at the house being cared for by staff while Jack was on war business in London. Margaret was also not at home on the 1921 census, as she was visiting her younger sister Joan in Westminster. Joan had been married and divorced by this time, and was working as a dressmaker’s model.

After this, Margaret and the children (and Jack, when he was in the country), lived first in Amersham in Buckinghamshire, and then in Putney. Another daughter, Eleanor, joined them in 1923, and they rented out Shurnhold House.

It’s while they were in Putney that a glimpse of Margaret’s life to come starts to shine through. There’s a newspaper reference to a Mrs Giffard being involved in demonstrating the skills of working dogs, alongside a police dogs demonstration, in January of 1924 at Crystal Palace. The article radiates some excitement at the potential for the use of working dogs, since this was a particularly new idea anywhere other than the North East transport police forces who had been using dogs since around 1906. She was also an honorary secretary of the Alsatian Sheep, Police and Army Dog Society around this time.

However, there’s no further mention of her connected with dog training after this, and Jack seems to have decided to become a farmer in the newly formed British colony of Southern Rhodesia, so left for Africa in September 1925. Margaret’s father appears to have gone out there slightly earlier, so the plan may have been for the rest of the family to come and join him and become prosperous out there. At some point after that Margaret and her daughters followed him, and both her sisters ended up there too. Jack went back and forth between various African ports and England several times over the next few years, but Margaret never seemed to be with him.

Mrs Giffard has one last mention at a Catholic wedding in Harare in 1927, where her two younger daughters were bridesmaids, and then there is no more mention of Margaret under that name.

Two of Margaret’s daughters as bridesmaids in Rhodesia in 1927

Jack remarried in Penhalonga, Southern Rhodesia, in 1933, so their relationship had come to an end. Her father died in 1938, in Wraxall, Southern Rhodesia, and – alongside leaving his housekeeper £200 for looking after his grandchildren – his will refers to Margaret as Margaret Bruce Griffin, so it appears that she had remarried too.

This marriage took place in New Zealand in 1930, to Harold Desmond Griffin. They returned to Britain in 1935 and settled in Sussex, where Harold worked as a farm manager and Margaret started her own boarding kennels. This marriage does not appear to have lasted either, as by the beginning of the Second World War Margaret was in Surrey, living on her own. She kept goats and poultry, and was training dogs for both war and the police.

Margaret was, by this stage, a renowned breeder and trainer of German Shepherd dogs, or Alsatians as they were known at the time. She attended various dog shows with her charges, and was becoming well known for the breed. German Shepherds had been favoured as police and working dogs since the Hull force – the first in the country to employ dogs – had decided to use them in 1923. Forces elsewhere in the country gradually became interested, and the Home Office had set up a committee to evaluated the use of dogs in policing in 1934, with a couple of labradors added to the Metropolitan force in 1935.

There were two schools training dogs for war work. The Army’s War Dogs Training School was initially based at Aldershot, then at Ickenham and then in Hertfordshire. It started with just a few dogs but by 1944 had capacity for 750 canines. Margaret became part of the staff at the other school, the Ministry of Aircraft Production Guard Dog School (MAPGDS), which was based at Woodfold near Gloucester. This school had been founded in November 1941 by Lieutenant Colonel Baldwin, and started with just 15 dogs. Two years later there were 665 dogs either training or working at Ministry of Aircraft Production sites throughout the UK. The MAPGDS was absorbed into the RAF Police and retitled the RAF Police Dog Training School in 1944.

While working with training police dogs was important in terms of developing that relationship and the skills involved in policing, Margaret and a couple of other trainers actually played a far more important part in war work. She was involved in the instigation of training and using dogs to locate and find people needing rescuing from disasters – bombs, gas explosions and building collapses. The concept of Search and Rescue Dogs was an entirely new idea at the time.

The dogs used for rescuing, however, while trained at these schools, weren’t those used by the military or police but instead tended to be the personal dogs of these trainers.

The story of how dogs came to be used for rescuing trapped people from under rubble is rumoured to have come from Colonel Baldwin having watched The Siege of Stalingrad at Cheltenham cinema which gave rise to the idea that dogs – with their enhanced sense of smell – could be trained to locate buried casualties. Indeed, the first documented rescue of an avalanche victim located by an untrained dog occurred in 1937. Margaret lit on the idea and started working on it with dogs from her kennels, and recalled a couple of dogs that had previously been through the MAP school to see if they could be retrained. One dog she retrieved from New Zealand.

They began working on commands and tells, and eventually gave a demonstration to the Minister of Home Security where volunteers hid themselves on bombed sites amid burning rags. The dogs had located their targets within two minutes. The first dog to go into service was Jet, who had been trained by Margaret. The dog started working on a site that had been bombed by a V-1 attack in north London in October 1944, and was distracted by onlookers, but soon after that located three deceased casualties after another attack at Purley.

After this, Margaret formed a team with two of her dogs – Irma and Psyche – from her renowned Crumstone Kennel, and worked alongside rescue teams throughout the doodlebug blitz, where V-1 flying bombs fell on London, to locate casualties buried under collapsed buildings. Between them, Margaret and her dogs managed to locate 233 victims in the rubble, 21 of whom were still alive. They also located buried pets alongside the humans.

Crumstone Irma, one of Margaret’s top dogs

Irma was particularly good at locating. She would change the sound of her bark when she felt that a victim was still alive, and would often not leave the site until the casualty was found. On one occasion it took two days to unearth two girls, and Irma refused to leave. Another tell from the dogs that indicated that someone was to be found was for Psyche and Irma’s ears to suddenly lie flat on their neck, and they would also excitedly scratch at the remains of the houses if they believed someone was alive.

Margaret, who attended the sites with the dogs in a blue-serge civil defence great coat and a beret with a German Shepherd badge on it, would also put her own safety at risk while working with her team to rescue people. She appears to have been incredibly brave and stoical about the work in hand. Extracts from her diary, which is believed to be held by the Dogs’ Trust, read:

11 and 12.11.1944. Rocket at Shooter’s Hill. 20.05 hrs. Public House, Ambulance Depot and 2 offices. Put Irma on right away. Frightful mess. Most of the casualties known to be in bar and billiard room of Pub but a few “unknowns” had to be located. Irma gave strong indication to right of debris… Digging proceeded here and after 2 hours the bodies of 2 women were recovered in the exact position, under approximately 7 feet of debris below the dog’s indication.”

21.11.1944 – Rocket on Walthamstowe (sic), 12.30 hrs. Arrived on site 13.30 hrs. Four houses completely demolished, about twelve badly knocked about. Things were made no easier by water pipes burst in all directions and a bad gas leak under the debris. A smashed meter was pouring gas into the rubble. Worked Irma. In spite of the stench of gas, she indicated at a point at the back of the debris. From the front of the building, she and I went right under the floors crawling on our stomachs in water. She lay down here when we reached a point approximately dead below the spot where she had indicated. Below this the bodies of a woman and two children were buried 4ft under fine rubble and dust.

20.1.1945 – Call to Osborne Road, Tottenham at 21:00 hrs. In house No.1 Irma found two live casualties. In No.2 Irma again gave good indication just to one side of a fairly large and fierce fire burning through collapsed house debris. Thick smoke rising here. Family of five found. In No.3 a strong indication from Irma over the debris. Rescue found a live cat.

Margaret and her dogs working

Once the war came to an end in the spring of 1945, the direct services of Psyche and Irma, and therefore Margaret, were no longer needed with such urgency. However, their courage and wartime roles did not go unrewarded. Irma had been awarded the Dicken Medal (a bravery award for working animals during wartime) in January of 1945, and she and Margaret took part in the victory celebrations on Pall Mall in June 1946, alongside the first rescue dog Jet. They were the only two dogs to take part.

Margaret herself received the British Empire Medal in the 1946 New Year Honours, for her work training and working alongside the dogs.

Away from her war work, both her sisters had died in Harare (then known as Salisbury) during the war – Joan in 1941 and Muriel in 1943. The rest of the family also seem to have continued living in either Southern Rhodesia or South Africa. Margaret’s eldest daughter Violet, had married, then divorced, a wildlife expert. She then married again. Her third daughter Jacqueline married in India during the war, and eventually moved to Australia. And fourth daughter Eleanor became a nun in South Africa. However, there is no indication whether Margaret ever went back to Southern Rhodesia to see them. Her ex-husband Jack died in 1956, also in Southern Rhodesia.

Once the war was over, Margaret and her dogs returned to the dog school at Gloucester, where Irma and Psyche demonstrated their skills alongside another dog called Storm, who was also from Margaret’s Crumstone kennel and had appeared on screen in Owd Bob (1938). The trainers, including Margaret, also began to investigate teaching their dogs to search for victims in terrains other than rubble. Lieutenant Colonel Baldwin arranged for three of the dogs to search a mine in Cumbria after an explosion in 1947. The groundwork put in by Margaret and other trainers during the war built the foundations for modern search and rescue operations.

Later on, Margaret is known to have exhibited dogs from her Crumstone kennel at Crufts Dog Show. There are pictures of her with Irma and Psyche meeting children that she had rescued from rubble in 1945, at Crufts in 1950. Eventually Irma died, and was buried at the PDSA Animal Cemetery in Ilford.

Margaret meets children she saved, c1950

As for Margaret, after 1950 she mostly disappears from public view. She continued to breed German Shepherds and train them when necessary for different purposes, and would also have continued to attend Crufts. She is known to have been based at Wallingford in Oxfordshire in the early 1950s, and have lived alone. The 1961 Crufts Catalogue has her entering German Shepherds in several categories, and advertising her small Crumstone kennel at Goring-on-Thames in the same pages, listing many winners in the UK and on the international stage. Her dog Crumstone Strolch had won many prizes and had starred in the films Circus Friends (1956), Ill Met By Moonlight (1957) and Norman Wisdom’s Follow a Star (1959). This probably meant that Margaret would have attended film sets with her dogs while they appeared on camera.

She died in Henley on Thames, in May 1972, aged 83. Her death went unremarked upon in the newspapers. In a case of life following art, the house where she spent some of her formative years – Rowden Hill House in Chippenham – is now in disrepair and used for the training of police dogs.

Ethel and Minnie’s stories

One of the best known and loved volunteers at the Chippenham Red Cross hospital during the First World War wasn’t a nurse. Ethel Williams was the hospital’s head cook, a role she shared with Minnie Shipp, and is remembered fondly in the surviving documents from the hospital.

Ethel’s actual first name was Gertrude – a relatively popular girls’ name in the 1870s, when she was born – but by the time she was 12 she was known to everyone as Ethel.

Ethel, in her VAD uniform

She was born in Chippenham, to an ex-soldier turned landlord and a mother who was particularly good at running pubs. She had a half-brother and half-sister from her mother’s first marriage, and at the age of five gained another sister – Elsie.

When she was small, the family lived at the Bear Hotel, but her parents gave that up and moved to St Mary Street. When she was 9 her father died, and her mother went back into the pub trade – running several establishments in the town with the help of her children and step-children. Ethel would have grown up helping out in her mother’s pubs – she had at least two at one point – and serving customers.

Aged 21, in 1900, she married a vet – George Williams – who was ten years her senior. She was living in Chippenham’s market place, while he was resident up near St Paul’s Church. The 1901 census finds them together, at the rather innocuously named 2 Langley Road. In fact, 2 Langley Road was The Clift House, a rather grand property with grounds and a fountain in the garden, which was finally demolished in the early 1980s and replaced with sheltered accommodation flats for the elderly.

Former Clift House on Langley Road in Chippenham, taken in 1906, while Ethel lived there

They had two daughters, Margery in 1901 and Caryl in 1905. In 1908 Ethel gave birth to her third child, a son, who sadly did not survive. This boy was not given a name. Their household appears comfortable, with a sizeable property and several domestic servants to help with the chores.

When the First World War hit, in August 1914, Ethel’s daughters were 13 and 9 and at school, and the shortage of male workers meant that women were encouraged to work and volunteer outside the home. While many women took roles making munitions at places like Saxby and Farmer (later Westinghouse), going out to work wasn’t quite right for women of Ethel’s social standing. Instead, they volunteered with the Red Cross. Ethel was part of the committee who worked to provide Belgian refugees arriving in Chippenham in 1914 with food and accommodation. They had escaped the early horrors of the war during that autumn, and were housed in various places in Britain, supported by the local Red Cross.

The next big Red Cross project locally was the hospital that was set up at Chippenham’s Town Hall in 1915. Ethel was engaged here from the outset, alongside other women of her social standing – for example, one daughters of the Clutterbuck family from Hardenhuish House also served, as did the daughter of Lady Coventry of Monkton Park, many of the wives of prominent town businessmen, and even the wife of Ivy Lane School’s headteacher.

The Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) provided nursing care for the wounded from the war, and were an important part of the war effort at home. Chippenham’s Town Hall initially had 40 beds, and received its first patients in early November 1915. Demand became higher, and the hospital expanded to include the Neeld Hall and the Corn Exchange, and by November 1916 there were 100 beds available.

Volunteer staff at Chippenham temporary hospital

Many of the VADs were nurses to the wounded, and – given Ethel’s sister Elsie was at this point nursing in London – it might be expected that Ethel took this role too. However, there were lots of other volunteer jobs needed in the hospital, such as cleaning the wards, attending in the mess room, and washing up.

Ethel became the hospital’s head cook, which she shared alongside Mrs Minnie Shipp from Foxham. Other women also cooked, and she had several volunteers helped prepare vegetables, but Ethel and Minnie were in charge. This meant that they served both patients and staff.

Minnie, who was born Minnie Hatton and originally came from the Bournemouth area, was the wife of a farmer and butcher in Foxham. She came from a food background – her father was a baker, alongside her husband being a butcher – so would seem to have been an obvious choice for the shared role of head cook.

Minnie Shipp, as a VAD

She and her husband Edgar had four children, three girls and a boy. Their son, Frederick, was old enough to serve during the war, so was sent away to the front while Minnie’s daughters stayed at home. They seem to have been a fairly wealthy family. Before setting up as a farmer in Foxham, her husband Edgar ran a butcher’s shop in Bath’s Northgate Street, and the family had several servants – including a “mother’s help” for Minnie. In addition to Minnie volunteering at the hospital during the war, two of her daughters joined her.

Records show that Ethel volunteered for many hours in alternate weeks during her time at the VAD hospital. Presumably, the weeks that Ethel didn’t work were the ones where Minnie was in charge. It’s Ethel’s food at the hospital that is well remembered, however, although Minnie’s fare was probably equally as good, perhaps because she remained in the town after the war where Minnie did not.

Ethel’s cookbook contains recipes for macaroons, nut loaf, pancakes, dried apricot jam and others to the delight of the recovering soldiers. Alongside her duties as a cook she was also in charge of entertainment, arranging visits to local homes and days out for the patients. One of her favourite activities was taking the men for picnics, especially to Cherhill (near Calne).

One picnic in particular would stay with Ethel forever. On 12th July 1918, whilst picnicking with the soldiers, nurse and their families, a Royal Flying Corps (RFC) plane crashed in a nearby field. Piloted by Captain Douglas Ridley Clunes Gabell, the plane was described as an R.E.8 C2236 (140 R et F or RAF WD/21146). He was only 20. Lieutenant George Frederick Delmar-Williamson (aged 19), of Black Watch Regiment, was the passenger on board. The aeroplane was a new machine, and it caught fire after it fell. The accident report recorded ‘both pilot and passenger died of fractured skulls’. The Court of Enquiry said the accident was caused ‘due to the wings collapsing in the air’. This incident affected Ethel greatly and she wrote to the father of Lieutenant Delmar-Williamson in Cheltenham to pass on her condolences.

Ethel served at the hospital until it closed in September 1917, and stayed with the Red Cross after the war ended. She was much loved by the patients, and one (Pte J. C. Dempsey) even wrote a poem about her. She was awarded a certificate of honourable service after the war.

After the war, Ethel returned to life as the vet’s wife, but still volunteered with the Red Cross. Her mother died in 1921, and her half-brother Joe Buckle ran a popular shop on Chippenham’s High Street.

By 1939 George had retired, and they’d left Clift House for a newer house on Malmesbury Road. Ethel was still in the Red Cross reserves during the Second World War. One of their daughters married, but the younger one still lived at home.

George died just after the end of the war, but left Ethel and other relatives a considerable amount of money.

Fellow cook Minnie did not stay in Chippenham. She and husband Edgar had moved to Dorset by the early 1930s, where one of her daughters ran a hotel. They were in West Parley by 1939. Edgar died in 1941, while Minnie lived on until 1946. When she died she left over £14,000.

Ethel lived on at Chippenham’s Malmesbury Road as a widow until the mid-1960s, when she died aged 87 leaving money to a solicitor.

She’s buried at St Paul’s church in Malmesbury Road, next to where her house once stood.

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A book, Unity and Loyalty: The Story of Chippenham’s Red Cross Hospital, by Ray Adler, explores the full story of the town’s VADs. It is available at Chippenham museum and the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre.

Charlotte C W’s story

One of the ways a gently-born Victorian woman who’d fallen on hard times could make an income respectably was to teach creative skills. In a society where women were expected to be decorative and provide entertainment, there was always a demand for those skills – from peers and for those who aspired to climb the social ladder.

That’s the route Charlotte took when her merchant husband returned to India without her, leaving her to bring up her small son alone. She claimed widowhood, taught piano and singing in fashionable circles, and gave recitals – in London, Chippenham, and Bristol. Except the qualifications she traded upon were actually later proved to be fake. And there is a question mark over whether she actually married her husband at all.

She was the daughter of Edward Peagam, a lawyer who occasionally called himself a gentleman, and his wife Mary. She was their eldest child, born about five years after they married (in London in 1846, with Edward calling himself a gentleman), in Sandbach in Cheshire – a pretty market town to the north-east of Crewe.

However respectable and middle class her background was, it does not appear to have been financially stable. Her father spent as much time becoming bankrupt as he did defending those with debt issues, and his name was often splashed all over the newspapers as owing money to creditors.

It was during one of those periods of bankruptcy that Charlotte was removed from the family home, and sent to Devon to be brought up by her grandmother and aunt Ann.

Her widowed grandmother, Mary Peagam, had been making a living as a hosier – someone who made legwear, so socks and stockings – but had acquired enough of a cushion to live off if wisely invested. Ann was her eldest unmarried daughter. Together they brought up Charlotte in Plymouth, and even when her parents’ financial situation was more stable she wasn’t returned to them.

By 1861 Charlotte’s parents had moved to Bicester in Oxfordshire, where her father was working as a solicitor. They had had two further daughters – Julia and Laura – so Charlotte had younger sisters, but she did not grow up alongside them.

At some point in the 1860s Charlotte’s mother had had enough of the constant financial fluctuations, and left her father. She returned to the Plymouth area with her two younger daughters, and they lived apart thereafter, and she may have seen Charlotte more regularly.

After her grandmother’s death in 1864, Charlotte’s aunt Ann moved into the supporting role for her. They boarded in Plymouth with another family, living off the interest of money, and at some point before 1879 moved to London.

Somewhere around this point, Charlotte met Cowasjee Wookerjee or Wookergee. He gave himself in trade directories as an East India Company merchant, but since that company had ceased to operate by 1874 it is likely that he was using the name and trading by association.

He had some sort of merchant business, importing products from India – possibly textiles – which was based in Leadenhall Market in the City of London. This was likely appealing to exclusive clients. However, since he was only there in the 1880 trade directory, he probably wasn’t there for long.

Leadenhall Market in London, where Cowasjee Wookerjee had a business in 1880

There’s no marriage record for Charlotte and Cowasjee in the British Isles, but it’s always possible that they did marry elsewhere. They certainly regarded themselves as married. Their first son, Pheeroze, was born in Paddington in 1879. They had a second son, Khoosow, in London in the summer of 1880, but later on that year Pheeroze died at just over a year old. The family do not appear on the 1881 census, taken that April, possibly due to poor transcription, but if they were in the country they were most likely in London.

There is a slim possibility that Charlotte had travelled to India with Mr Cowasjee Wookerjee and Khoosow, however. An article from an Indian newspaper in June 1881 says that he had selected and brought out machinery from Europe to start Scindia’s Paper Mill.

This, probably established by the Scindia family in modern-day Madhya Pradesh, made paper from rags and karbi (exactly what that was isn’t clear).

The article said:

“Great praise is due to Mr Wookerjee for the untiring zeal and energy he has show in connection with this scheme from which considerable results may be expected. The mill, indeed, promises to be a great success, especially as skilled European engineers and workmen have been employed to carry on the work.”

Whether or not Charlotte and Khoosow went to India, Charlotte’s marriage fell apart and they separated. She gave herself as a widow, but there’s another mention of Cowasjee Wookerjee in the Indian press in 1896, so that probably wasn’t the truth. She and her son were definitely in the UK by 1885, as the first evidence of Charlotte’s new career is reported upon then.

Giving herself as Mrs Cowasjee Wookerjee, Charlotte is reported as having sung at a Cricket Club concert in Monks Risborough, Buckinghamshire. This means that she and Khoosow were probably living nearby.

By February 1886 though, Charlotte had moved to Ealing and was starting to become more established as a teacher of music. She also had a stage name, Madame Elcho, which she used for performing and teaching purposes.

Her main qualification for teaching – she called herself a professor of music – was as a Fellow of the Society of Science, Letters and Art.

This society, which allowed Charlotte to put the letters F.S.Sc. after her name, was run by Dr Edward Albert Sturman from his house in Kensington. It allowed its members to wear academic dress and take exams that were not even marked, resulting in bought diplomas. Charlotte was thus duped, and traded on these qualifications for many years. The society was eventual exposed as bogus in 1892.

After only a couple of years in Ealing, she moved to Southall, where she further promoted herself as Madame Elcho and taught piano, organ, singing and music theory. She also performed once a week at Mr Adler’s Music Repository, in Uxbridge. George Louis Adler was a pianist, music dealer and composer, and used to run entertainments from his shop on St Andrew’s. Charlotte would have been part of a community of musicians and performers who worked out of here, and this would have enabled her to bring in new pupils.

After a year or two in Southall, Charlotte decided to move again. She chose Chippenham in Wiltshire for her new base, and set up home with her son Khoosow, who was then around 9. Her aunt Ann still lived with them, and would have helped her out with childcare and house duties.

In Chippenham she seems to have dispensed with the Madame Elcho name, and instead traded as Mrs Cowasjee Wookergee – a name that might have sounded quite exotic to the locals. She was initially based in Patterdown, from where she briefly advertised herself as a piano and artistic singing teacher, and said that she could travel to Corsham and Melksham for lessons. After that she moved to a house on Cook Street called East View, in the historic part of the town. Cook Street is now part of Chippenham’s St Mary Street, and is part of a particularly beautiful stretch of houses off the town’s market place.

From here she and Khoosow and her aunt Ann appear on the 1891 census together, on which Charlotte gave herself as a professor of music, and Khoosow would probably have attended the local elementary school by the church.

She had days of the week when she would teach in Trowbridge and Melksham, but seems to have been mostly based teaching Chippenham citizens to sing and play the piano. She also gave regular public performances. There is a report from 1890 of her singing as part of a concert at the Congregational Church, alongside other local performers. She also ran a series of piano concerts in the town hall, and tutored a choir of children to perform too.

When advertising her teaching services, Charlotte would occasionally submit testimonials to tempt potential pupils.

According to her, Musical World said of her: “In all she does a true and artistic feeling is made manifest.” Similarly, The Era apparently said that she had “grace and elegance” in her method. And the Court Circular said: “Can sing from D on the bass staff to B flat above the treble line, and she has been well trained in the Italian School of Art. Three recalls at the end of the evening rewarded her efforts to please.”

She was in Chippenham until at least 1892, but by 1895 her services are being advertised from Keynsham, to the west of Bath. Here she was directing concerts, and also performing throughout the 1890s at the Hamilton Rooms, which were on Bristol’s Park Street. There are also newspaper reports of concerts in Bristol’s Staple Hill, and one where she and others were entertaining inmates of Bristol’s workhouse infirmary.

It’s therefore no surprise to find her living in Bristol on the 1901 census. She and her son Khoosow and aunt Ann had set up home in Cumberland Street, in the city’s St Paul’s district. This would have been a relatively fashionable address for the time, even if the houses were in multiple occupation. Charlotte continued to give herself as a professor of music, while Khoosow, now aged 20, was a clerk at the post office. Ann still had no profession given, but would have been occupied with home duties.

After this point, Charlotte seems to have been starting to live a quieter life. There are no reports of concerts in the press, but she probably still taught.

Khoosow married in 1907, and went to live in the St Philips area of Bristol, where he worked as a packer for a printer. His wedding certificate gave his father as Cowasgee Wookergee, a general merchant. He and his wife Laura had several children who grew into quite a dynasty.

The following year, Charlotte’s aunt Ann died. She was quite elderly, and it’s likely that Charlotte may have had to do some considerable nursing in her twilight years. In 1909 Charlotte’s father died at Lutterworth. His financial situation does not appear to have settled entirely – he’d operated out of Southampton, Torquay, north Wales, and Rugby. His death was remarked upon in the press, and it sounds like he was well respected despite his monetary failings.

Charlotte herself is illusive on the 1911 census, but we know from an advert in the newspapers of that year that she had moved to Frampton Cotterell, in South Gloucestershire. She appears to have run some sort of market garden, offering baskets of produce for delivery. This is considerably different from teaching music, and perhaps reflects a more settled way of life.

Charlotte died in 1914, not long after the outbreak of the First World War. She was 62 and still living in Frampton Cotterell, though she was buried at a church in nearby Coalpit Heath.

Esmé S’s story

Following the stars and taking spiritual guidance from the universe around us has been part of human existence from time immemorable. But in the 1920s, with several generations having moved into the industrial cities, many people were starting to feel a disconnect from the natural world.

One of Esmé’s illustrations

The time was ripe for the early beginnings of popular astrology, reading fortunes from the stars – which could still mostly be seen in city sky scapes. Of the back of this growing interest, the 1920s saw horoscopes included in daily newspapers for the first time. Those with less conventional religious views, and an interest in esoteric matters started to grow with the changed and slightly more open society created after the first world war, and one woman who was particularly active in those circles was Esmé.

“Esmé Swainson” was really a stage name, initially, and rather than any sort of mystical or occult background she came from quite traditional British roots. She was born Emilie Alice in the early 1880s at Headington in Oxfordshire. Her father was Charles, a warehouseman who sometimes called himself a merchant, and her mother was named Sarah. She was the eldest of three kids. Her family background was wealthy – their household in 1891 had three servants.

The family had moved to Lewisham in London by 1901, and Esmé said she was a student artist at the age of 19. This probably meant that she was studying various creative arts, which included music. There are also a couple of references to her performing in concerts, as Esmé Swainson, around this time. She is known to have been a singer, and to have played piano.

One of Esmé’s illustrations

In the autumn of 1908, Esmé married Harold at West Bromwich, and went to live in Birmingham with him. He worked in advertising. Although she was now in “the provinces”, as theatreland outside London was known, she kept her music up, and worked as a music teacher. They originally lived in the Spark Hill area of the city. She advertised her services as a music teacher in a trade directory of Birmingham in 1908, and appeared on the 1911 census as a professional musician. She and Harold had no children.

Harold signed up for the Royal Air Force in 1917. At that stage he was working as a stage manager. He gave his next of kin as his wife Emilie, at a Birmingham address. However, he noted that they had separated on his sign up form.

Divorce at this time was still fairly difficult for a woman to achieve. She had to prove that her husband had been adulterous, and also that he had been cruel/violent or deserted her, or committed rape/incest/bigamy. In contrast, the husband only had to prove that his wife had committed adultery. Therefore, if Esmé and Harold’s marriage had broken down with no-one else involved, or as a result of his adultery, they had no grounds for a divorce, and Esmé would have remained tied to Harold financially, even though they were separated.

Given Howard was a stage manager, and Esmé a performer, it is likely that the circles they moved in were slightly more bohemian than general society at that time, and separation and divorce would have carried less stigma.

Round about this time, Esmé began a new relationship with William, an electrical engineer. He was a few years older than her, and due to him nearing 40 at the outbreak of World War 1 he probably didn’t serve in the forces.

William was also technically married, however, though it appears that he’d also separated from his wife. They’d married in Yorkshire, and had had two sons, but appear to have split by 1915.

They moved away from Birmingham at some point between 1917 and 1923, and set up house in a sizable villa just outside Bath, in Somerset.

If Esmé’s marriage breakdown was merely due to Howard’s adultery, or he had had a relationship with someone else since their split, 1923 was the first possible year that Esmé could have gained a divorce. The private members bill introduced in this year meant that women no longer had to include additional causes, which was brought into law as the Matrimonial Causes Act. The move to Somerset may be a direct consequence of this.

Esmé, by 1923, called herself Mrs Swainson on this document. Divorced women would still often call themselves by their married title at this time, but the fact that she is using her middle/stage name as an official name indicates that there has been some shift in her status.

In Somerset, Esmé appears to have stopped working as a music teacher, and gained an interest in writing and lecturing. Her subjects were usually more fringe religious matters, and astrology. She was quite involved in the Theosophical Society, and gave various different lectures, including one in 1925 in Melksham which looked at destiny and free will in the context of astrology and reincarnation.

Today, we see astrology as something quite separate from Christianity, as it would seem to be quite different from the belief system in the Christian church. However, Esmé’s beliefs seem to mention God and Christ as part of her practice. Certainly, at this time when most people in the UK were still nominally Christian, even though church-going was starting to change, the ideas offered by astrology and the occult carried more traction with the public if they were linked to wider accepted beliefs. So, even if Esmé was not nominally Christian, she linked much of her work to that belief system, at least in a general sense.

She also advertised her services in more esoteric publications of the age, like “The Occult Review”, from which this advert is taken in 1926.

At this time, the monthly publication offered various insight into esoteric matters and ideas present in psychology. A sample contents list for one of the 1926 editions included Magic of the Mantra, Some Evidential Clairvoyance, Sorcery in France and Africa, Reincarnation in English Poetry, and The Influence of Personality on Leadership. All are subjects that would not feature in mainstream newspapers, but are clearly of interest to the clientele that Esmé was appealing to with her work.

In around 1933, Esmé wrote and published a book on the basics of astrology. This was aimed at children, but also provided an introduction to the subject for a general readership. A review said that it “serves a two-fold purpose; it can be read merely as a fairy tale for children, yet its narrative contains many facts of occult life (on which the authoress is an expert) in its fairy tale guise, and is true in its Zodiacal symbolism”.

The text of the book, alongside some of Esmé’s illustrations, can be found here: https://rosanista.tripod.com/courses/razeng01.htm

The 1939 register has Esmé still living at her villa. On this document, she says that she is divorced, and working as a market gardener, writer and lecturer. This would indicate that she drew some living from the agricultural land around the house, and this probably subsidised her other work. William is living with her too, but says that he is still married. This indicates that he has not legally separated himself from his former wife, who in fact was living nearby with one of their sons at the time.

She continued to lecture on various occult and esoteric subjects for the next few years, taking in venues around Bath and in Bath itself.

A report on Esme from 1944.

William died in the summer of 1956, and left a considerable amount to both Esmé and his son Joseph, who was working as an accountant. Esmé was referred to as a widow on the probate document – meaning that her former husband Howard had died. Being a widow was considerably more respectable than being a divorcee, and many divorced women would change their status to widow as soon as they could.

Three years after his death, at the very end of the 1950s Esmé left the UK for India. She sailed from Southampton, heading for Mumbai. She said that she was an author, and that she intended to live in India. This may just have been for travel, or for furthering her knowledge of eastern philosophy matters.

A 1959 travel brochure on Mumbai, of the type that may have attracted Esme.

Whether that worked out or not, she returned to the UK at some point after 1960. Esmé died in the early summer of 1966 back in Somerset, aged 84.

Isabella L’s story

Isabella Maria Constantia, named perhaps for her father’s fascination with Italy and its people, was orphaned by the time she was three. Her mother – her clergyman and poet father’s second wife – had died giving birth to her in 1776, and her father died in 1779 aged only 45.

She had a brother, John, who was eight years her senior, but he had been brought up by an aunt since his own mother’s death in childbirth, so the orphaned toddler Isabella was alone in the world. She’d been born in Blagdon, Somerset, where her father had been the Reverend since 1766, but he’d really made a name for himself while working for several churches in London – and it was there that Isabella was sent. He’d become friendly, while living there, with the Gillman family. Thomas Gillman, who was involved in the law (although what sort of position he held is not clear), his wife Catherine and their daughter Catherina Elizabeta were named Isabella’s guardians and protectors in her father’s will.

She was removed to their house in Great Ormond Street – at this stage a street of important people living in smart sizable town houses that dated from the beginning of that century and not the site of a famous hospital for sick children (it wasn’t built until 1852) – and began a life in London as their ward. The Gillman’s daughter and only child Catherina was in her later teens, so the age gap between the two girls was vast, and it seems likely that they all lavished their attention on the young Isabella, who would have been brought up in considerable privilege for the time. This was a great time to be a privileged child, as the period brought in huge amounts of books, toys and games aimed at children, and began to value and educate their developing minds in a far more structured way. Isabella’s father had instructed that she would benefit from the sale of his goods and chattels to help fund her life with the Gillmans, all her mother’s clothes, and a further sum of £1,000 to be held in trust for her when she reached the age of 21. He also bequeathed her and her brother a diamond ring apiece.

Two houses on Great Ormond Street at the time Isabella lived there.

When Catherina married in February 1783, Isabella was around the age of seven. Though Thomas Gilman was still in Great Ormond Street, Isabella went with Catherina to be the ward child in her new marriage. Catherina had married Esmead Edridge, the lord of the manor at Monkton House, in Chippenham in Wiltshire. The Edridge family, who were initially Quakers and had mostly been born in Bristol, had had the house since at least the 1740s. At this stage, Esmead was the eldest son, but there were many other siblings still associated with the house – his older sister Love Mary had recently married and moved to Bath, but younger brothers Thomas, John and Abraham were all unmarried and at the house, running a business as clothiers of the town. In addition to the four men, their widowed mother Love and unmarried sister Martha completed the large household that Catherina and Isabella joined.

Shortly after the marriage, Esmead had Monkton House renovated. This altered what had originally been a substantial farmhouse-style property into a grand Georgian mansion of many rooms. He appears to have made a reasonable living as a merchant, as well as being Lord of the Manor, but it may be that Catherina’s dowry brought in additional funds for the building project. Brother Abraham had a smaller house built in a similar style, possibly using the same architect and builders, in St Mary Street just across the river. The property is currently used as apartments, and has purpose-built sheltered accommodation on the land leading down to the river that may initially have been used for fulling and dyeing cloth.

Isabella, at just seven, now grew up in this great house full of people. Esmead and Catherina, who had no children of their own, considered her their daughter to all intents and purposes. They educated her, probably at home with a governess, and she was considered part of the wider Edridge family. There were no other children known to have lived at Monkton House at the time.

Monkton House, Chippenham

This position changed in 1798, when Isabella had just turned 22 and had come into her inheritance. She engaged in a clandestine marriage with Abraham Edridge, Esmead’s younger brother, who had been in the position of uncle to her throughout her childhood. Catherina and Esmead were said later to have been deeply offended by this act because of this prior relationship. Abraham was a good 15 years older than Isabella, and had also fathered an illegitimate child – John – in his late 20s who was regarded as his heir, and who became Isabella’s stepson. As an aside, Esmead and Abraham’s brother Thomas had also had an illegitimate son at around the same time, but he was not acknowledged, and John’s elevation appears to have been due to a lack of any legitimate male heir anywhere in the family.

Isabella then went to live with Abraham, probably at his house on St Mary Street and became mistress of that property. They are known to have paid hair powder tax around now, so would have been fashionable enough to wear wigs. They did not have any children together. Isabella’s marriage technically made her the social equal of Catherina and other gentry wives, but given the controversy surrounding the marriage it is unclear whether they were accepted in local society.

Abraham Edridge’s house in Chippenham, where Isabella became mistress

In the very early 1800s, Catherina – who was then in her early 50s – started to suffer mental health issues and in the parlance of the time was declared a “lunatic”. Descriptions of some of her behaviour put this as close to dementia. She was removed from Monkton House to Fisher House, which appears to have been a London residence. Isabella tried to work with the family to help Catherina be placed in environments that were comfortable, going through legal means if necessary.

Around the same time, Isabella and Abraham moved from Chippenham to Pockeridge House, on the edge of Corsham, which is now on Ministry of Defence land and was converted to an officers’ mess during the second world war. The property there was substantial, and Abraham’s son John lived with them there when he wasn’t serving with the Royal Navy. In this house she was able to be a gentry wife away from the house she’d grown up in, but still maintained her links with Chippenham.

Esmead, her adoptive father, died in 1812. At this stage Isabella’s care of Catherina seems to step up a gear, perhaps as he was not there to stand in the way. She goes through legal means to have access to Catherina despite the judgment of lunacy. This made the newspapers, and the scandal over Isabella’s marriage was raked over by the press. It was agreed, however, that Isabella could take Catherina out for drives in her carriage, and could look after her at Monkton House as she was more comfortable there and her symptoms reduced. Isabella argued that since Catherina had looked after her from childhood, it was now time for her to look after her guardian.

Catherina, despite her illness, managed to outlast Isabella by six years. Isabella died at Pockeridge in 1820, aged 44, and was buried close to where she’d grown up in Chippenham. Catherina died in 1826, and was buried with Esmead at Chippenham. Abraham continued to live at Pockeridge, with his son John and his first two wives (there were three in all), and died in Bath in the early 1840s. He is not buried with Isabella.

Cassia D’s story

For much of the 20^th century, school head teachers were supposed to be formidable and particularly scary, so a visit to them or even just an interaction should have put the fear of God into a pupil. However, Miss (Edith, more often known as Cassia) Denne, who was the first head of Chippenham’s Girls High School in 1956, still has a reputation among women of the town for being particularly fierce and terrifying. The school buildings have now been incorporated into the town’s Hardenhuish School, but the girls’ school she founded fully came to an end in 1976.

Cassia in 1950

Like any scary teacher though, Cassia was in fact only human – although that fact often does not occur to pupils – and had a life before and outside the school she presided over. She gained a science degree at a time when women attending university was still very rare, and science was still considered mostly a boy’s subject. She even at one point joined a convent. And had taught at various other schools before appearing in Chippenham.

Edith Cassia was the first child of her father’s second family, born in 1906 in a village just outside Canterbury. She was followed four years later by her brother William. Her father had previously been married to a woman named Harriet, and Cassia and William had older half-siblings – Esther, Amelia and Percy – who appeared not to live with them while growing up by virtue of being much older. Harriet had died in 1903, and Cassia’s father (a bricklayer employed by Canterbury cathedral) married her mother Emma in 1905. Both were from Kent, born and bred.

Cassia was educated at Simon Langton Girls Grammar School in Canterbury, being bright enough to pass the entrance requirements and rise to the top of the school. This school still exists, although the buildings Cassia would have attended were destroyed in the Second World War. Her father died in 1917, when he was 60 and Cassia was around 11, and as such would have been too old to fight in the First World War. Cassia, once she had finished school then went on to the University of London, and gained a BSc in the sciences in the early 1920s. She took her mother with her.

Chippenham Girls High School appeared not to keep a record of their staff’s careers before joining the school – this was often more common to long-established grammar schools – so it is impossible to trace Cassia’s full career before she arrived in Chippenham. However, a newspaper articles reporting her headship of a previous school have given some clues to where she taught and lived.

She began her teaching career in 1928 after completing her degree. Going in to teaching was often the choice of bright young women coming out of university at this time, as it enabled learning to continue and gave the chance to impart what you’d learned so far to young minds. A degree was not required to become a teacher, particularly for women, but it did mark out women as committed and ambitious. There was also a marriage bar for female teachers at this time, meaning that if Cassia had married she would have not been able to keep her job. However, that does not have been a consideration for Cassia. This bar was removed for the London school boards in 1935, but not for the rest of the country until 1944.

She taught at Blackburn Grammar School in the 1920s, and by the late 1930s Cassia was on the staff of Dame Alice Owen’s School in Islington. She was living with her mother Emma in Hendon for much of that decade, so it’s possible that her first few teaching jobs were closer to there. By 1939 she was established as very much a part of Dame Alice Owen’s as the biology mistress.

The original Dame Alice Owens Girls’ School, which Cassia taught at

At the outset of the Second World War, the school moved as one to Kettering in Northamptonshire, taking all the teachers and evacuating the students. Cassia initially lived in Kettering, in digs alongside the school secretary Rita. Her mother went to Harpenden in Hertfordshire instead, so they were separated, at least initially. About a year later the boys part of the school moved to Bedford, where it remained for the rest of the war, but the girls stayed in Kettering – alongside various other evacuated schools from London, including St Aloysius’ Covent School, two Catholic primary schools and Clark’s Secretarial College.

One of her pupils, Veronica Pinckard, remembered an incident involving Cassia during these years.

“On our way to school one lovely, hot sunny day, my friends and I were enjoying an ice-cream cone when we spotted Miss Denne, our biology mistress. They threw theirs in the gutter, but I was a thrifty little soul and hated waste. Putting it in my pocket was a messy idea and hiding it behind my back seemed childish, so I brazened it out. Miss Denne was furious. ‘Eating in the street – in uniform – without gloves, Veronica is very low class. You shall not make a mockery of Dame Alice Owen’s. You will report to the headmistress immediately.’ She confiscated my blaze and straw hat, which was pointless as I was wearing the very distinctive saxe blue dress with the school emblem emblazoned on the breast pocket. Everyone in town knew which school we belonged to.

Miss Bozman, the headmistress, scolded me rather gently, told me to be more circumspect, reminded me to wear gloves at all times and not to eat ice cream in public. It was unladylike, and I must always uphold the traditions of our illustrious school. Then with my promise to do just that, she gave me back my blazer and hat.”

(Veronica Pinckard, A Damn Fine Growth, published 2012)

Veronica, perhaps understandably given this incident, had no love for Cassia, describing her as “mean”, and as someone who delighted in dissecting insects and frogs as part of her biology lessons.

This episode shows the respect for ladylike qualities, and class boundaries, that were expected of young women at the time, and that had been bred and enforced into women like Cassia. Teachers considered it their moral duty to enforce these morals into their charges, and were rarely off duty. Eating in the street was seen as vulgar, and uncouth, much as being improperly dressed without a hat and gloves, and was part of a peculiarly British sense of morals, and all about outward appearances.

The original Dame Alice Owen’s School girls’ buildings were bombed in 1940, so the school did not return until 1945. Cassia went back to London with them, and her classrooms were now temporary huts on the former school site. She rose to become their senior science mistress, and lived in Finsbury with her friend Rita.

In 1950, fancying a change, Cassia took on her first school headship. She moved to become the third headmistress of the girls’ part of the Silver Jubilee Schools in Bury St Edmund’s, Suffolk. The schools, established in 1935 to commemorate the 25^th anniversary of George V having the British throne, were at this stage part of the Secondary Modern schools that had been created in the tripartite system in 1944, providing a general extended secondary education and training for pupils not expected to go on to higher education. In the early days of these schools, the provision was continuing the elementary school style education that had flourished since the 19^th century, but gradually more ideas were added to the curriculum and in some towns the main employers would have an influence on the skills the children learnt.

Here, under Cassia’s jurisdiction, the sexes were kept strictly separate at the school, with a white dividing line in the playground. In addition to further English, Maths, Science, Scripture and some humanities subjects, the girls studied commercial, secretarial and nursing courses. Domestic science, often the backbone of girls’ education at the time, was also heavy in the curriculum, which would have encompassed food technology and techniques, textiles, and other home economics skills.

Cassia (left) with prefects at the Silver Jubilee School in 1953/4

Four years later, having been well respected in the town as the head mistress of the school, Cassia decided on a full career change. She left the world of schools behind, resigning her head teacher position, and planned to enter a convent.

At this stage, in 1954, she was 48 and at the top of her profession – and may have felt that the life of a nun was right for her in terms of both spiritual and career fulfilment. She would also have long gone past the age where most women of the time expected to marry, even though she could now do so and keep her job, which may or may not have been a consideration. Or this may have been a long cherished ambition for her. Whatever her reasoning, she handed over her Bury St Edmunds school to the next head teacher Edith Crocker, and prepared to take holy orders.

Exactly what happened next is not known, but Cassia did not last more than two years in the convent. Whether being a nun was not what she expected it to be, or she missed teaching too much, she returned to teaching in 1956. She took on the position of head teacher at the brand new girl’s high school – another secondary modern establishment – in Chippenham, a market town in Wiltshire.

Chippenham Girls High School was opened 10 September 1956, by education secretary and Chippenham MP Sir David Eccles and his wife Sybil, taking the girls away from the mixed secondary modern which had operated out of the old grammar school site on Cocklebury Road since the Chippenham Temporary Senior School was formed in November 1940.

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by Walter Stoneman, bromide print, 1953

Sir David Eccles, MP for Chippenham, and his wife Sybil. Both signed the school log book.

The new building was close to the buildings that the grammar school had moved to in 1939, and had been purpose-built for their use. Four years of schooling were offered at the time, from 11 until the school leaving age, which was then around 14, so at the end of what was is now called Year 10. There were 486 girls on the roll at the beginning of the school, with 22 teaching staff and a school secretary. They offered English, maths, science, music, history, and a LOT of domestic science. With a nod towards the surrounding area, the school also offered rural subjects. They supported some girls who had already started work towards their GCE – but the ambition of Cassia and her school was to further improve the depth of the education offered to the girls of the town. The staff wanted to aim for the University of Cambridge courses, not the Associated Board syllabus that they had been working to before, and one of the first subjects discussed at staff meetings was the provision of advanced courses (beyond the GCE examinations) in Secondary Modern Schools.

This came to fruition quickly – two years after the school’s founding, in 1958, there were over 600 girls on the roll, and the school offered a Fifth Form and even had a lower Sixth Form. And by 1959 there was a full opportunity for girls to study either for GCE, general subjects, or practical courses, and they were streamed accordingly. Shortly after this commercial subjects were added to the senior school provision.

In terms of school life, Cassia’s log book regularly records sports matches against other local secondary modern schools – those in Melksham, Malmesbury and Calne most often – and athletics tournaments, with educational trips and visits from speakers intended to inspire the pupils. For example, a representative of Simplicity Dress Patterns (clothes making was an important skill when very little came ready-made) visited in October 1958, and the school held a fashion show to demonstrate the skills they’d learned, and in 1966 they hosted Flying Officer PL Sturgess of the WRAF to talk to the girls about opportunities in the armed forces. And in July 1959 the BBC radio discussion programme “It’s My Opinion” was broadcast from the school hall. Some pupils remember that when the neighbouring boys’ school opened across the field at what is today Sheldon School, Cassia altered the start and finish times of the school to discourage her girls from spending time with the boys on the way to and from school.

The buildings used for Chippenham Girls’ High School

Cassia remained at the school until the summer of 1966, having presided over some initial discussions about integrating secondary education in the town a couple of years earlier, although this did not take place for several more years. She’d had a period of ill health just after Christmas in 1966, and had lost her mother the previous year, so at the age of 60 took retirement. There was a presentation made for her in that July, with guests served tea in the library afterwards.

She returned to the school at least once more, to talk about its history at a celebration event in 1975, alongside second head teacher Miss Wilkins.

She and her friend Wendy moved to a bungalow overlooking Bath, where she offered tutoring to some select children. Cassia and Wendy then spent her last years together by the sea, on the south coast of England at Worthing in Sussex. She died there in 1991, aged 85.

Lena B’s story

Sarah Eleanor, known to the world as Lena, didn’t quite run off with the gypsies, but was steeped in the world of the travelling shows that toured and entertained the UK in the later part of the Victorian era and into the 20^th century, gave birth to many, many technically-illegitimate daughters in a little horse-drawn caravan around the whole of northern England, and ran a clog-dancing family act that appeared on variety and music hall stages for years.

Lena was a soldier’s daughter, born in the later part of the 1860s in the Colchester area of Essex. The 1871 census finds her living in Edinburgh with her parents and younger brother George, but it’s not clear if they’re permanent residents or passing through. Her elder sister Mary Ann had been left with her maternal grandparents in Westmoreland.

Lena’s childhood appears to have been one of constant movement – while she was born in Essex, sister Mary Ann entered the world in Lancashire, brother George in Winchester, sister Rachel in York and brother Charles in Leeds. This indicates her father’s military role took him to many different places, and the growing family were probably housed in barracks when Lena was small. Later siblings Agnes, Alice, Elizabeth and Archibald were all born in Burnley, Lancashire – so by 1876 Lena’s father appears to have stopped soldiering and started to put down roots. However, by 1881 he is unemployed and the older children in the family – Lena included, then only 14 – were working as cotton weavers to make the family ends meet.

In 1887, when she was around 20, Lena got married. Her husband was Henry, who worked in Burnley as a warehouseman – quite possibly in the cloth trade of the area. He was a widower, with two sons of his own. Their first child, a son called George, was born at Todmorden in 1889, and then their daughter Ethel was born three years later in 1892.

At some point around this time, however, something went awry in Lena’s marriage to Henry, which was only five years old. She appears to have met another man – Barnaby – who was a little her junior and had also been working as a cotton weaver in the area, and took up with him instead. Around this time Lena’s father died, aged just 46.

While divorce was possible for people of Lena and Henry’s class, and Henry would have had a case with his wife’s adultery, legal proceedings could be prohibitorily expensive, unless taken up as a pauper cause – which Lena and Henry obviously weren’t. Many people in their position saved for years to be able to bring proceedings to court. Lena and Henry never did though – it may have been reasonably amicable, or at least a situation they could live with. Lena’s new life with Barnaby may also have been a factor – he had started running an auctioneer’s van that travelled around the area, so the social factors around a new partner for Lena may have been easier to manage if she never stayed in one place too long. The death of her father may also have been a factor in this change of direction – as he wasn’t around to question Lena’s choices. Exactly what Barnaby was auctioning in different places in the north of England is open to question – presumably these were things he bought off one community and then sold off to the next – but it appeared to be lucrative enough to support a small family.

Lena and Barnaby’s first child, a daughter called Marguerite, was born in Clitheroe, Lancashire, in 1894. She was followed by Alice in 1896, who was born in Oldham in Lancashire and baptised four months later in Halifax, but died before her second birthday in Hemsworth, Yorkshire. Around the same time next daughter Georgina entered the world in the back of the auction van in Dewsbury, again in Yorkshire.

This pattern repeated itself over the next few years – babies born in one place and then christened in another: Mary in Burnley in 1899; George in Belper (Derbyshire) in 1901, twins Ann and Louisa in Lancester (County Durham) in 1903, with Ann dying in Nottingham a short while later; Alice in Prescot (Lancashire) in 1904; Charles in Fylde (Lancashire) in 1906; and Wilhelmina in Saddleworth (Yorkshire/Lancashire border) in 1909. All were born on fairgrounds, as naphtha flares lit the sky.

This creates a picture of many people on top of each other in a small horse-drawn space, with little privacy, and a constantly mobile lifestyle. However, daughter Marguerite actually attended grammar school for a year in Derby around 1903, so at times Lena and Barnaby must have been static. On the school records their van is parked at the Market Square. It is equally possible that Marguerite may have lived with others during that year, however, while her family kept travelling. Lena and Barnaby would reportedly pull up in towns and villages and set up a big fit up theatre tent, where Barnaby would auction many different things, and then he and Lena would perform a melodramatic skit. As the children grew they would join in too. Barnaby had apparently got his start in the theatre in Blackpool productions, and had been a partner of George Formby Senior in his early years.

Lena’s older children appear to have lived with their father and/or other relatives for at least some of the time. While Ethel is living with Lena’s widowed mother on the 1901 census, and Lena and Barnaby are with their children in Alfreton in Derbyshire, by the time the 1911 census comes around both Ethel and the first George are with their father in Burnley – Ethel working as a cotton weaver and George as a shorthand typist at one of the town’s cotton mills. Henry claims to be a widower with no children on this census, which isn’t exactly true but was perhaps an easier explanation.

Meanwhile, on the same document, Lena and Barnaby and eight children (ranging in age from 1 to 16) are living in their show caravan at a fairground at Blackrod near Wigan. By this time Barnaby had given up the auctioning business at some point after 1906 and had moved on to something far more early 20^th century – cinema projection. He would have carried his equipment with him in the van, including projectors and film reels, and broadcast the black and white silent films of the day to audiences. This would have been part of the whole travelling side show experience, with a growing audience appetite for the moving pictures that would have been projected on to the canvas of tents as part of a range of attractions – possibly including music, dancing, circus skills, and curiosities like strong men or bearded ladies. More information about travelling shows can be found at the National Fairground and Circus archive: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/nfca

Two years later, Lena’s legal husband Henry died, so she and Barnaby were finally able to marry. They did so in the summer of 1913 in Burnley. Barnaby had taken some work as a painter and carpenter in the run up to the first world war, so it is likely that they were static for a while. With the babies of the family starting to be able to assert themselves properly, the family reinvented themselves as music hall theatre artists, as the skills they had gained and developed among the travelling shows came to the fore. By all accounts they could sing, dance, act and play instruments. They formed a family act, with Barnaby in charge and Lena playing all the mature female parts, which appeared on the sands of Morecombe Bay three times daily in the summer of 1913 – and were promptly fined for not having applied for performance licenses for Louisa and Alice, then aged 10 and 8 respectively. They had also performed in the same place the previous year. Eldest daughter Ethel, Lena’s daughter with first husband Henry, appears to have joined the family troupe around now, but her eldest son did not.

Lena’s talents appear to also have been in performing, although she seems to have known what would entertain audiences too. Her first mention as a performer and dramatist in her own right came in the early months of 1914, when she is billed as Madam Parsons and the originator of a pantomime version of The Babes In The Wood featuring her seven daughters – now called the Seven Lucky Lancashire Lasses – as part of a “first class cast of 30 artistes” which ran at a theatre in Derbyshire. The choice of name for the family act appears to derive from the Eight Lancashire Lads, a troupe of clog dancers founded in the 1890s who were also touring and treading the local boards and at one point included Charlie Chaplin, but Lena’s daughters’ unique selling point was that they were all related. The girls all could clog dance too – a style developed in the cloth mills of Lancashire which was performed in wooden soled shoes that were worn in the factories, and is a pre-cursor to tap dancing.

The beginning of the First World War, and its associated patriotic fervour, appears to have sent Lena’s star into its ascendancy. Barnaby went off to war early – in the autumn of 1914, when married men weren’t required to until 1916 – and the family act became Madam Parsons and the Seven Lucky Lancashire Lasses and continued to tour northern stages. Newspapers would give the impression that Barnaby was the driving force behind the act, but Lena spectacularly taking the reins during the war years shows that she was also prodigiously talented and very much at the head of the family entertainment business.

Lena took the part of Britannia in one part of their performances, with her children, including the two younger boys, were England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, soldiers, sailors and boy scouts. A great fuss was made of their “Soldier Daddy” who was away with the army, initially in France and then in the Army Ordinance Corps when his health prevented front line duty. Lena and the children sold postcards of themselves, and sheet music, and performed to raise money for war funds, with Lena directly appealing to packed houses for money to support the armed forces and medical services. Other acts joined them, including acrobatic roller skaters, gymnasts, singers and comedians, but Lena appears to have been completely at the hilt of the shows. There would have been various administrative and production duties involved in producing the shows – licenses for underage performers (you had to be 12 before you could perform legally and therefore special paperwork was needed for the younger members of the family), wages for other performers, and stagecraft, and many other considerations – which Lena would have taken on.

Lena as Britannia in her family’s patriotic performance

Lena and daughters around 1920

Barnaby was discharged from the army in 1917, and returned to the fold with the family, who were at that point living in a van in Morecombe. The performances continued, with a move into music hall rather than travelling shows, and he appears to have taken charge at a theatre – at least briefly – where he’s described as a pantomime proprietor. They put on performances of The Babes In The Wood and Cinderella in various theatres during the winter months. Their claim that they were the only related family act performing anywhere is given in every advert, with £500 offered if this claim was not true, and it sounds like Lena was still a big part of the performances and the administration. The 1921 census has them living in Morecombe, possibly in a house but more likely in a caravan on open ground, with Barnaby describing himself as an amusement caterer, and Lena and their son Charlie as music hall artists working for him. Lena’s widowed mother had also joined them by this stage. They continued performing, with engagements every week, for many more years – in various theatres, and each summer in Morecombe Gardens for three performances daily – until at least the mid-1920s.

The gradual marrying off of Lena’s daughters put an end to the long-running family act, although most married into the theatrical business. Eldest daughter Ethel married John, a clerk at the lino works in Burnley, in 1914. Her performances with the family continued through the war years, but it’s uncertain how much of a role she played afterwards. They had no children, and lived in Lancaster. The others stayed closer to the family business, still taking part in performances. Daughter Marguerite, known as Maggie, married in Scarborough in 1920 to a music hall director and had a son and described herself as a variety artiste, while Georgina married Samuel Sharples in 1925. After her widowhood in 1939 she lived with her parents and her son, and still performed in the family act. Doris, known as Dolly, married a music hall director. The boys married too: Charlie to Mona, a professional dancer.

Mary, known professionally as Eva, married a pianist in 1924 and had a son. Daughter Alice married Speedy Yelding, a clown and comedy wire walker, in 1927, while youngest daughter Wilhelmina, known as Mona and a stunning banjo player, did not marry until 1962.

Lena and Barnaby retired to Southport. In later years Barnaby, known as Papa Parsons, gives his profession as an advertising agent, so he and Lena are probably managing the careers of many performers, including their offspring. Charlie and George had their own variety act, that played on the Blackpool coast for many years, and towards the end of his career Charlie made a couple of appearances in Coronation Street.

Papa Parsons died in 1945, in Southport, to a major outpouring of grief from his offspring and wife in the newspapers. Lena’s death, the following year, went unremarked upon – though she was a considerable part of the family business in her own right.