George and Emily with Jack, Bill and George Jr, early 1910s. According to the London Advertiser, the 1912 picnic was at Port Stanley, and the 1913 picnic at Springbank Park.
Back in Part 1 of this tale, I posted a picture of the three eldest Cartwright sons with their parents, George and Emily, at the annual picnic for McCormick’s, the biscuit and candy company where George worked. An observant reader pointed out that the family appeared to be wearing mourning ribbons, and in Part 2, I explored that topic. I was hoping to find clues by establishing when the picture was taken and comparing that to events in the family. Who was the group mourning? I guessed at the date of the picture, thinking the youngest boy, our grandfather Bill, was either three or four years old, which meant that the year was either 1912 or 1913. If the picture had been taken in 1912, some time after baby Edna’s July death, then perhaps the ribbons were for her. If the picture was taken in 1913, why wasn’t baby Stuart, born that January, among his brothers? And who were the ribbons for?
I’ve made a couple of discoveries since then — as usual, somewhat by accident. I had already visited the London Advertiser at Canadiana Online to search for mentions of family members, but the search mechanism is a bit clunky, and if you get a “hit,” you have to read the whole page to find the word you searched for. “Cartwright” often proved disappointing, since there is a Cartwright Street in London that was frequently mentioned. Instead I decided to browse through the Monday, July 22, edition of the paper in the year baby Edna died, thinking it would be interesting to know what was happening in the city that day, and in the Cartwrights’ wider world. To my surprise, I stumbled on an article about the annual McCormick’s picnic, which had been held two days earlier.
London Advertiser, July 22, 1912
Below the article was a list of winners in various races, with a “Mrs. Cartwright” included among three names for the “Married Ladies’ Race.” Was it Emily, flying along in her hat and long skirts, hoping to trounce Mrs. McCabe and Mrs. McInnes, George and her little boys cheering her on? Likely yes, since there weren’t that many Cartwrights in London at the time, let alone Cartwrights with a McCormick’s connection. The old family albums contain a number of pictures from games played at these annual outings over the years, so I think it’s safe, in this case, to surmise that the Cartwrights attended the picnic in 1912, just two days before Edna’s death, and that Emily, a few months pregnant with Stuart, took part in the festivities.
Curious to know if the paper would offer any more clues, I scrolled through the next day’s edition, and soon came upon a little notice:
London Advertiser, July 23, 1912
So the Cartwrights must have attended the picnic on Saturday, and then shortly after that, baby Edna fell ill. The same edition that features her death notice carries a cheerful photograph of the winners of the baby show being held aloft by their parents and the judges, the picnic crowd behind them.
What a great sadness this death must have been for Emily, George and their three little boys. When the 1913 picnic rolled around, with pillow fights, three-legged races, and a tug of war between the biscuit and candy departments, surely the family was reminded of the previous year, of Emily taking part in the Married Ladies’ Race, and then Edna’s death soon after. Is this why they wore the previously discussed mourning ribbons? Or were they mourning ribbons at all?
Searching through the photographs we scanned years ago for The Cowkeeper’s Wish, I came upon a McCormick’s picnic image dated 1922. This one shows George and Emily with two of their younger children, Gordon and Mary, the great aunt who’d been the keeper of Stuart’s baptism certificate until her death earlier this year at age 100. If you look closely, you’ll see that George and Gordon are wearing ribbons; perhaps Mary and Emily are wearing them too, but it’s hard to see in the old photo. Clear enough, though, is the lettering “McCormick’s” on the other two. So more than likely, the darker ribbons in the photo taken a decade earlier were also to do with the picnic.
George and Emily with children Gordon and Mary at McCormick’s annual picnic, 1922
Gordon, age 3, sporting a McCormick’s picnic ribbon, 1922.
That same year, 1922, the London Advertiser carried a mention of “G. Cartwright” having the largest family in attendance — seven children in all. In the family tree as we knew it, that’s all the Cartwright kids accounted for: George, Jack, our grandfather Bill, Earl, Florence, Gordon, and Mary. Do, the youngest, was not yet born.
It’s very satisfying to solve these little mysteries, but of course the big one still lurks. What happened to baby Stuart, for whom we have a baptismal certificate but no birth or death record? Can we assume that, because baby Edna is not in the earlier picnic photo, it was taken in 1913, a year after her death? But if that is the case, Stuart was born in January of that year. Why is he not in the photo?
As we’ve seen, assuming can be problematic. When this whole tale first began, I assumed my great aunt Mary had tucked the certificate away in her bedside table, knowing it would be found after her death. Perhaps she knew something about baby Stuart that she’d never told anyone, and she didn’t want him to be forgotten. But there’s a danger in reading too much into the fragments that come our way in family research. And much can be learned by sharing information with other family members who might hold missing pieces. My mom’s cousin Susan Butlin, also an author and a lover of historical research (The Practice of Her Profession, McGill-Queen’s University Press), was the one who found Stuart’s baptism card after Mary’s death, and she describes the discovery this way:
“The Baptismal certificates, along with several Confirmation certificates, were found in the right top drawer of Aunt Mary and Dorraine’s long, low bureau of drawers in the bedroom, not the bedside table, I don’t know where that came from. They were neatly placed together in a small book, it might have been a New Testament, from which they stuck out. Also in the drawer were things like new gloves, small boxes with pieces of jewelry, small personal things that were valued. After I looked at them, I saw Stuart’s certificate and, according to my sister, I said ‘Oh my goodness, look at this!'”
Susan agrees that it’s highly likely that Jack, Bill, Stuart and Earl (Susan’s father, and the baby born after Stuart, in January 1914) were baptized at home, together, in September 1914. But why, and what became of Stuart after that, remains unknown. I still hope to find out that he was buried at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, where Emily and Edna lie, but Covid, quite understandably, means that cemetery staff is slower than usual in replying to these sorts of requests. The history section of the website shows pictures of the old burial registers, dating back to the 1870s, so if Stuart was buried there, the details will be hiding somewhere in those pages. Finding Stuart’s grave won’t tell us how he died, but it will be one more piece of the puzzle, and might lead to still more clues as to what happened to him.
The Cartwright family in 1933. What could they tell us now? Had Stuart survived — and if he existed! — he would have been 20 years old in this picture. Bottom, left to right: Mary, Dorraine, Emily, and Gordon. Top, left to right: Earl, George, George senior, Jack, Florence, and Bill.
Home baptisms for multiple children? The plot thickens…
Emily Ingram Cartwright in her choir robe, 1920s London, Ontario. Was the church always a big part of her life?
In the last few days, another clue has come in from the relative who found the scrap of paper containing burial details for babies Emily/Sissy and Edna. It turns out two other baptism certificates were in Great Aunt Mary’s possession: one was her own (born 1921), and the other belonged to John Frank Cartwright, known as Jack, the middle son in the trio of photos of George and Emily’s eldest boys. Mother Emily was pregnant with Jack when she came to Canada in the summer of 1907, and he was born that October, after “Sissy” had already died. The document shows Jack was baptized seven years later, on the same day as Stuart: September 26, 1914. Again the word “church” has been crossed out so that the place name for the baptism reads “Parish of Church of the Redeemer.”
Those of you who’ve been following the story closely (see parts one, two and three) might remember that when we originally discovered the card bearing Stuart’s baptism details, we thought it was strange that he’d been baptized more than a year and a half after his birth. George and Emily were regular churchgoers, at least in later years, so we assumed they’d have had their children baptized quickly. Was it a clue that there was something wrong with Stuart, and were they prompted to get it done when he was close to dying or being sent away? Now we know Jack was baptized with Stuart, which makes me wonder what the situation was for the other children, for whom we have no cards.
Here’s a list of the first seven of George and Emily Cartwright’s offspring:
Eldest boy, George, born 1905 in England. We don’t know when/if he was baptized, but presumably not in England, since the baptisms for that area/era (Bexley, Kent) are available online and his is not among them.
Emily Louise, George’s “Sissy,” born 1906, England, died August 18, 1907, buried the next day at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, London, ON. As with George, we have no baptismal info.
John Frank aka Jack, born October 1907, baptized in the parish of Church of the Redeemer, September 1914.
Edna May, born July 1911, died July 22, 1912, and buried two days later at Mount Pleasant Cemetery. We have no baptismal info.
William Charles, our grandfather Bill, born May 1909. We have no baptismal information for Bill.
Stuart Ingram, born January 1913, baptized in the parish of Church of the Redeemer, September 1914.
Earl Richard/Richardson Ingram, born January 1914. We have no baptismal information for Earl.
The new information, and the gap in age between Stuart and Jack, makes me suspect that several baptisms happened at once. If Jack and Stuart were baptized that day, surely Bill was as well, being between them in age. And since no baptismal record for their older brother, George, has turned up among similar records in Erith, perhaps he was also baptized that day, though by now he was nine years old. The daughters, of course, had died already, but the youngest of this group, Earl, may also have been included, since he was nine months old in September 1914. Come to think of it, if there ever had been baptism records for babies Emily and Edna, surely they would have ended up among Mary’s belongings as well, since Mary inherited the family papers etc., and the ill-fated girls never grew up to take their certificates off with them.
Of course, it isn’t unusual to find groups of siblings in baptism registers. In fact, when I went hunting for the English-born children George and Sissy in the register for Bexley, instead I found their mother Emily and her three younger sisters being baptized in June 1907, just before her departure for Canada, and after her husband had left to get settled there. Emily’s sisters were 16, 18 and 19, and she was 21 years old and already, according to family lore, estranged from her parents. So what prompted this group trip to the church? Why weren’t they baptized earlier? Were they something other than Church of England before this time, or were they simply not a religious family? Did the baptism provide Emily with a sense of security for her forthcoming trip across the ocean? If so, why didn’t she have her babies baptized at the same time? Whatever the reasons, the information is intriguing. George Cartwright — Emily’s husband and the father to the brood of 11 (if we count Stuart) — was baptized as a young child, as were his siblings.
Emily Ingram, bottom row, left, with two of her sisters behind her. 1890s Erith, England.
One thing the new information tells us is to avoid assumptions. Speculation can be a great exercise, but it’s important to stay open to all the possibilities, because you never know where you might go wrong in closing a door. The other thing that comes to mind is that, if the siblings were baptized along with Stuart that September day at the beginning of WW1, they were gathered together, wherever the baptisms were performed. Bill was five, Jack was almost seven, and George was nine. So they were old enough to remember the occasion and the brother, too. Why did no one speak of him in years to come?
The picnic photo was taken almost two years after the baptisms of Stuart and Jack (centre) and possibly the other siblings. George, the eldest, is on the left, and Bill, our grandpa, on the right.
And what does it mean that the word “church” is crossed out on the cards? Were the children baptized at home? And if so, why? From what I can glean online, home baptisms in those days usually happened because a child was ill and not expected to survive, and couldn’t be brought to the church. If this was the case with Stuart, did the minister come to their home to baptize him, and perform the ritual for the other children as well, since he was already there? Or perhaps they had all come down with a some sort of illness, and only Stuart didn’t survive? It occurs to me that even if we do find out where Stuart was buried, we will still not know how he died, or why there is seemingly no birth or death registration.
Children’s graves, jotted notes, and an old nickname…
Dundas Street in London, Ontario, in 1910, in the years between Emily and Edna’s births. Courtesy Toronto Public Library
Curiously, the search for Stuart Ingram Cartwright, begun in Part 1, keeps leading us back to his sisters, Emily and Edna, who died young but unlike Stuart were always remembered by the Cartwright family.
In Part 2, I mentioned that we had birth and death records for Emily and Edna, but we didn’t know where they were buried. I thought if we could find their graves, we might also find a grave for Stuart, since all we have for that elusive child is a baptism certificate.
I wasn’t sure how to go about finding burial records, but I started at the Ontario Ancestors’ London Middlesex branch, where I found links to the Ontario Cemetery Index, the Ontario Cemetery Finding Aid, and The Ontario Name Index. None of these avenues turned up anything I didn’t already know, so I wrote to the London Public Library, and a helpful librarian looked through newspapers and cemetery listing for me, but nothing came up. Following the librarian’s suggestion, I wrote to the Diocese of Huron archives, and am awaiting their reply.
Mary, already looking like someone who knows things, with her big sister Florence, 1920s in London, Ontario
In the meantime, though, my recently deceased 100-year-old Auntie Mary has surprisingly revisited this story. As news of the Mystery Baby blog posts made its way to extended family members, another descendant of George and Emily wrote to say that several years ago she had helped clear out Do and Mary’s apartment so they could move into one better suited to their old age.
“There was one room that was FULL of furniture, magazines, etc.,” she wrote, “and we had to go through it and save anything valuable like family papers, photos.” Among the items, she found a wooden box of letters and telegrams and some handwritten notes, just jottings on scraps of paper, written at a much later date for the purposes of genealogy. One of these included a note about babies Emily and Edna May, and said simply:
Mount Pleasant
Emily L. (Sissy) Born England. Died 14 mths. 1907
Edna May Born 1911. Died 1912.
Plot QB 583
I was surprised to see the nickname “Sissy,” which underscored what a loss her death must have been, not just to the parents, but to brother George, too, who’d crossed the ocean with his new little sister weeks earlier. I wondered, did the family attend these burials? Were there funerals for the girls too? My relative thought this might be the area in the cemetery where many children and babies were buried. Coincidentally, just the day before, I had been walking with my friend Anne, and telling her about Stuart. Back in the 1990s when she was in university, Anne had worked at a different Mount Pleasant Cemetery here in Toronto, and she remembered that there’d been a section for babies, and that it always got special attention from the groundskeepers.
After a bit of sleuthing, I discovered that the Children’s Garden, as it’s now known, has a heartbreaking back story that was detailed by Toronto Star writer Michele Landsberg in 1992. In the 1960s, the son of a woman named Mary Smith died at just five days old. He’d been born prematurely, and before that single tragedy, Mary had suffered five miscarriages in a row. The doctor advised the woman’s husband he didn’t think she could handle this new loss, and arranged for the child’s burial without her knowledge. Later, when she fretted the child hadn’t had a proper funeral, she was told his body had been put in a coffin with a woman who was being buried, to ensure he had a Christian burial, but that there was no way to know where the child lay. “The worst,” she told Landsberg, “was that I didn’t know where he was. I couldn’t go stand on the spot.” She grieved for this baby for years, and felt “perpetual anxiety” that something terrible would happen to her other children. She followed them to school to be sure they made it there okay, and she had nightmares that they’d been taken away from her.
Many years had passed when she told the story to some friends, who were shocked by the preposterous idea of the child being buried in a stranger’s coffin. Within days, they had clarified this detail was not true, and traced the baby’s grave to Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Toronto, in an area reserved for stillborn babies and children with no known parents or otherwise difficult family situations, like poverty. The discovery made an enormous change in Mary’s life, and eventually, with the help of others, she began to plan a commemorative garden for the area, full of native plants like sweet woodruff, highbush cranberry, and serviceberry. These she planted with her own hands, a cathartic experience that enabled her to tell Landsberg, “I don’t cry anymore. The bitterness is gone.” The garden was planted with each season in mind, so that, “like children, it [would] always be growing and changing.” Surely today it remains a special place for families of children gone too soon.
The only known picture of baby Emily Louise, nicknamed “Sissy,” asleep in her mother’s arms in 1907 before their departure from England. There are no known photographs of Edna, and nothing but the baptismal certificate to suggest Stuart existed.
Having discovered Michele Landsberg’s article about Mary Smith, I’m touched to realize this is the same garden my friend Anne tended in her university years. It was fairly new then, and she didn’t know its history, but she went on to become a midwife, and has an intricate understanding of the griefs and joys associated with childbirth — the sweep of emotions George and Emily Cartwright experienced with the arrivals and departures of babies Emily, Edna, and perhaps Stuart, though we still know so little about him. This side trip into Mary Smith’s story, prompted by my walk with Anne, takes us a long way from those century-old tragedies, but history is a winding road, and we will make our way back using a different route, hoping for more clues to the mystery.
I have written to Mount Pleasant, London, to see what more can be learned about the girls’ burials, and to see if their brother — presuming he existed! — is there too. I would also like to know why the girls’ names don’t turn up on a search of people interred there. Are they in a children’s section like the one the Smith baby went to, and if so, how many other children lie there? Are their graves marked in any way? What led Emily and George to choose this place? Or did they have a choice?
Mourning ribbons, picnics and a gap in the family tree…
After posting Part 1 of the recently discovered mystery baby’s story, a number of comments came in, both here on the website and also on social media. We’re very grateful when people share their thoughts, especially in a case like this, because it helps us see things we may not have noticed on our own. For instance, I included a picture at the end of the last post — just on a whim, really, because I thought it was a nice photo and it was of the era I was writing about. It shows our great grandparents, George and Emily, with their three eldest sons, George, Jack and Bill.
George and Emily Cartwright at Springbank Park, London, with their sons Jack, Bill and George, standing
Someone wrote in to say that she noticed the family members were all wearing mourning ribbons, and wondered if the picture had been taken after baby Stuart’s death. Tracy and I were stunned to realize we hadn’t noticed the ribbons before. Or perhaps we had just assumed they had something to do with the McCormick Biscuit Company’s annual picnic, from which there are many family pictures over the years. If you’ve read The Cowkeeper’s Wish, you’ll know that we are lovers of detail, and that we’ve gone down many rabbit holes in search of even the tiniest fragment of rich content for our story. I guess sometimes it’s true: you can’t see for looking.
Needless to say, I’ve spent the last while looking up mourning ribbons!
After Queen Victoria’s husband died, she wore black for the rest of her life. When she died in 1901, newspapers reported the event “has given a remarkable impetus to the ribbon trade,” and that £200,000 of mourning ribbon had been sold.
Among the well-to-do, mourning attire could be quite elaborate through the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Following Queen Victoria’s lead during her decades of mourning for her beloved Prince Albert, widows draped themselves in black frills and flounces and ruffles. There were lacy mourning parasols, long delicate veils, fur-trimmed capes, and hats laden with velvet and feathers.
But there were subtler expressions of grief as well: brooches with braided hair inside; lockets that held an image of the lost loved one. Perhaps the simplest and most affordable form of mourning attire was a black ribbon pinned to the clothing, just as our Cartwrights are wearing. This post about mourning ribbons says they were also known as “love ribbons,” and were frequently worn by children and the less-well-to-do, who could not afford head-to-toe black garb for the family. But even these could be fancied up. A 1901 British columnist writing as “The Bohemian Girl” reported that “Some of the new mourning ribbons are exceedingly pretty–white edged with black, and black edged with silver, or white with black chenille spots.”
From all the descriptions I’ve read, it makes sense to me that the Cartwrights are wearing mourning ribbons in the Springbank Park photo. But who are they mourning? A little timeline will help put the players in context:
On December 31, 1904, George Cartwright and Emily Ingram married in England.
Their eldest son George was born in June 1905.
The next child was Emily, born about a year after her brother, in the summer of 1906.
On June 22, 1906, Emily was caught stealing from her uncle. Newspaper accounts say she was “approaching her confinement,” and took the money out of desperation. She appeared in court at the end of August, carrying “an infant a few months old,” so baby Emily must have been born very soon after the theft.
In March 1907, George sailed for Canada, and in July, Emily and the children followed. By this time, Emily was pregnant with the couple’s third child, John, who’d be known as Jack.
In August 1907, at 14 months old, baby Emily died of pneumonia in London. The family residence was on Pall Mall Street. The death registration doesn’t tell us where she was buried.
In October 1907, baby Jack was born at the home on Pall Mall Street.
In May 1909, a third son, Bill (our grandfather), was born. By now the family had moved to Horton Street.
On July 22, 1911, at 3:30 in the morning, Emily gave birth to Edna, who died on her birthday, at Horton Street, in 1912. Like her sister Emily, she had pneumonia.
On January 4, 1913, Stuart was born, according to the baptism certificate tucked away by Auntie Mary. Given the birthdate, Emily must have been pregnant with Stuart when Edna died, just as she’d been pregnant with Jack when her first daughter died. What is it like to lose a child while another one is growing inside you?
On January 4, 1914, exactly a year later, Emily gave birth to another son, Earl Richard Ingram Cartwright. And in September, Stuart was baptized.
There were more children to come, but I’ll stop there for now so we can return to the photo with the ribbons. My guess is that the youngest child, our grandfather Bill, is three or four years old in this picture. If he’s three, it’s the summer of 1912. And if they are indeed wearing mourning ribbons, they must be mourning baby Edna, who died on July 22. So if the photo was taken later that same summer, Emily would have been at least four months pregnant with Stuart. Emily’s father also died in March 1912, so I suppose it’s possible they were mourning him — but you’d think Edna would be in the picture if it was taken before she died. If Bill is four in the photo, it’s the summer of 1913, and Emily is pregnant with Earl. But there is nobody to mourn in this scenario, since Edna and Emily’s father are long gone and Stuart is born but yet to be baptized. I’ve tried to find out what month McCormick’s annual picnics happened, but so far I have not succeeded.
Springbank Park in the 1910s, from the Toronto Public Library’s collection of park postcards
The other thing I’ve considered is the possibility of Earl and Stuart being the same person. They were both born on January 4th. They were both given the middle name Ingram. But why would George and Emily register Earl’s birth under the name Earl Richard Ingram Cartwright just days after he was born, and then baptize him as Stuart Ingram Cartwright months later, only to go on calling him Earl? So I’ve discounted that possibility, and chalked up the January 4 birthdates as coincidence, just like Edna coming and going from this world on July 22.
The fact that Ingram was given as a middle name to two sons, one after the other, is an intriguing detail. Emily had fallen out with her family, as I mentioned before, probably because she got pregnant before marrying George. The theft may have caused a further rift. No one knows for sure what the real story was, but the break may have added appeal to the move to Canada, and it appears it was never mended. Whatever caused it, it must have been painful for Emily. Perhaps the death of her father in 1912 spurred her to use Ingram as Stuart’s middle name in 1913. But why also use it for Earl in 1914? Stuart was obviously still alive at that point, because he wasn’t baptized for another nine months. And why was Earl given two middle names? (The birth record clearly says Earl Richardson Ingram Cartwright, though my understanding is that he was always known in the family as Earl Richard Ingram Cartwright.) The only other Cartwright child who had more than one middle name was the very last daughter, Do, and this was only because Emily (perhaps weary of the task!) let her kids choose the names. So why did the pattern break with Earl? Was there some reason that Stuart might not be able to carry the Ingram name forward, so it was given to Earl, too, just in case?
It might be crazy to speculate about all this, and perhaps many of the questions are unanswerable. Some, on the other hand, might be easier to unlock. For instance, when were the annual McCormick’s picnics held? Where were baby Emily and baby Edna buried? Is Stuart there too? When were the other Cartwright children baptized in relation to their births? Where have those certificates gone?
The biggest question, of course, is: What happened to baby Stuart?
I’ll close with a few more photos.
This photograph shows Jack, left, with baby Bill and George Cartwright, 1910
This one shows George and Emily with the same three boys. Perhaps after Edna’s death and before Stuart’s birth?
This photo shows the same set of brothers, George, 11, Jack, 9, and Bill, 7, in 1916, at the annual McCormick’s picnic.
Our great aunt Mary, sweeping out her potato-sack tent in London, Ontario, mid-1920s
Tracy and I spent years researching The Cowkeeper’s Wish, and while we never expected we’d filled in all the blanks of our family history, we thought we’d done a pretty thorough job, and any mysteries that lurked unsolved were far away in the tree, and not terribly integral to our story. And then our great aunt Mary died, at the impressive age of 100. The birth certificate for her baby brother Stuart sat in the drawer of her bedside table, as if she’d purposely placed it there so it wouldn’t be missed among the remnants of her long life. As far as we can tell, no one now living ever knew about Stuart’s existence.
We interviewed Mary and her sister Dorraine for our book several years ago when we first began our research. Unmarried sisters who’d lived together all their lives, they were a wonderful resource for us, and their recent deaths, one after another, marked the end of that generation of our family. As the last children to live at home with their parents, Do and Mary were keepers of the family archive, a treasure trove of photographs and old documents, and even the family furniture. To our delight, they recounted all sorts of stories about our grandfather (their brother Bill) and the wider family. Of special interest was anything they could tell us about their parents, Emily Ingram and George Cartwright, who’d come to Canada from England in the early 1900s and raised a large family in London, Ontario.
The Cartwright clan, with Emily overdressed for the beach, and little Do and Mary in the front row
Emily Ingram Cartwright with baby Emily, little George and her in-laws, shortly before leaving England for Canada
It was our understanding that there were 10 children in total. The eldest two, named Emily and George for their parents, had been born in England. Their father sailed for Canada in 1907, got himself somewhat settled, and then sent for his wife and kids. Baby Emily was nearly blown out of her mother’s arms while they were at sea one blustery day, and one can only imagine how tightly she was held for the rest of the voyage. And yet, the little girl died anyway, of bronchial pneumonia, not long after their arrival in Canada.
George found steady work at McCormick’s Biscuit Factory, and Emily proceeded to have more babies: two boys and then another ill-fated girl, who died on her first birthday. These daughters – Emily and Edna – were not a secret. Their many later siblings knew they had existed, and the girls were diligently placed in family trees created by subsequent generations.
Which makes it hard to explain Stuart. Why had no one heard of him? Mary, known for her phenomenal memory, obviously knew something about him, because she tucked his baptismal certificate into the drawer of her bedside table before she died. She’d been asked oodles of questions about family over the years, not just by us but by others interested in history and genealogy. But she never presented this intriguing piece of paper.
The document itself raises more questions. It says that Stuart Ingram Cartwright was baptized in September 1914, but gives a birth date of January 1913. George and Emily were regular church-goers, so it seems odd that they waited so long to have Stuart baptized. And it would seem the ceremony wasn’t performed in a church, since the word “church” is struck through and replaced by the word “parish.” The baby was baptized in the parish of Church of the Redeemer. Even more puzzling is the fact that no official birth or death records have surfaced. What became of Stuart? Was he sent away from the family? Or did he die young? Why did no one ever speak of him?
Even the most ordinary family has secrets, and a few had already been revealed about this particular branch: Emily had been pregnant before she married George, and had become estranged from her family; she’d been arrested for stealing from her uncle not long before leaving England for Canada; and her sister married that same uncle, even though nieces and uncles are not permitted to be husband and wife. Each of these discoveries was fascinating and surprising. Our mother, who knew her grandmother as a strict, somewhat intimidating, and morally rigorous lady, was shocked to imagine her as a thief. And while we couldn’t ask Emily for her own perspective of the story, we had newspaper accounts and wider family information that helped us put this new information into context. With Stuart, though, we’ve hit a brick wall — which only makes us more determined to find him.
This post marks the beginning of our search.
George and Emily with their three sons at McCormick’s annual picnic in the early 1910s
“He had the impression of being in a strange country …”
Some of you will remember my recent series of posts about Hugh Russell, a WW1 soldier with shell shock, or what we now call PTSD. In my ongoing attempts to learn more about that affliction and the struggles veterans had reintegrating after the war, I’ve since been researching a man named John Armitage, who’d had a nervous breakdown of sorts after the first use of poison gas at Ypres. By 1916 he’d returned to Canada and was stationed at Aldershot Camp in Nova Scotia. The following year he married a woman named Emma at St. George’s Round Church in Halifax, the ceremony officiated by the minister Henry Ward Cunningham. Despite the union, John’s troubles continued. His pension record references “occasional emotional disturbances” in June of that year, and states that he “cries for hours about once in six weeks, following exceptionally hard work.” His complaints were like those of so many other men: nightmares, nervousness, insomnia. But though his story is a fascinating and tragic one, this post is not about him, and is a fine example of the twists and turns we encounter when we piece together the histories of ordinary people.
St George’s Round Church, 1908, courtesy Halifax Public Libraries
Although John was stationed at Aldershot during this period, and also in a sanatorium nearby for a time, his service record places Emma at a Halifax address. Judging by the dates scrawled on a form, it appears the couple was still in Nova Scotia in December 1917, when two ships collided in the Narrows, just north of Halifax Harbour. One of the ships had been loaded with munitions, and the collision caused a fire on board that soon saw the vessel engulfed in flames. Within 20 minutes, the ship exploded, spewing debris and toxic fumes over a wide area on both sides of the Narrows. The blast was so enormous that blocks of buildings were decimated, and windows shattered as much as 80 kilometres away. A tsunami washed the second ship ashore, and devastated a Mi’kmaw village situated along the Dartmouth waterfront, home to some 17 families. Rachel Cope, a child watching the scene from there, later recalled how the opposite shore had “seemed to shimmer like a reflection in a still pond and then everything went black.”
Nearly 2,000 people died, and 9,000 were wounded. For soldiers, it must have looked as though war had swept through the region as vehemently as at Passchendaele or the Somme, snapping trees and lamp posts and obliterating people’s homes. Almost immediately, soldiers were put to work gathering the dead and sorting through rubble for survivors. If John Armitage was among this band, it must have been gruelling work indeed, the kind that traumatized mentally healthy people let alone those who were already struggling. But everyone everywhere was helping — firefighters, police, railway workers, doctors, nurses, and ordinary civilians lucky enough to survive the blast. Afterwards, according to personal accounts collected for the Halifax Disaster Record Office, one officer recalled seeing “a trail of blood” as refugees streamed away from the hardest hit areas. As he directed soldiers in the work of removing bodies, he noticed in the distance “patches of white scattered all over” on Citadel Hill. The image puzzled him until someone explained that these were cloths laid over the faces of the dead.
Women walking from Africville towards Halifax, on Campbell Road near Hanover Street. William James family fonds, City of Toronto Archives.
Stories have a wonderful way of weaving into each other during this kind of research. So while looking for John Armitage, instead I discovered more and more about Reverend Cunningham, the man who’d married John and Emma at the Round Church months earlier. Born in Newfoundland, he was about 55 at the time of the Halifax Explosion, married, with several grown children and a son at war. Like the officer mentioned above, he shared his recollections of the terrifying event with the Halifax Disaster Record Office.
That morning, December 6, 1917, he had just finished his breakfast, and his wife was handing him a cup of coffee when a deep boom thundered, as if a bomb had burst on the church lawn. All at once, a “mighty rush of air” smashed the windows and blew in glass with the curtains, and he was thrown under the table, bleeding from a cut in his neck. He looked for his wife, who had run to the basement, and from outside he heard children at the local school screaming. For a couple of hours, until it was certain no further explosions would occur, he and his neighbours were crowded into the Halifax Common not far from the church, but as soon as he could, he went to check on parishioners. The devastation was everywhere. He saw homes reduced to nothing more than “a pile of bricks and a bath-tub,” bodies covered with burlap bags, fires blazing. One woman told him that when the vessels had first collided, she’d called to her children to “come out and see the beautiful sight of the burning ship,” and then was thrown 300 feet when the blast occurred, her clothing torn from her body.
The scene Reverend Cunningham witnessed as he made his way through Halifax after the explosion. Gottingen Street, December 6, 1917, Library and Archives Canada.
I was curious to know more about this man who’d donned “old over-alls and old cap” and gone out looking for his parishioners that awful day. “There were fires along both sides of him on Union Street,” his interviewer wrote. “He had to pick his way over wires and debris. As he looked over the hill-side, he had the impression of being in a strange country – that he had never been there before. It was ‘terribly unfamiliar.’” To add to the monumental difficulties dealing with the explosion’s aftermath, a blizzard blew in the following day, stranding rescue teams coming from other places and cloaking the ruins in snow.
Reverend Cunningham’s work continued in the days and weeks after the explosion. “His house was deluged with hundreds of people,” and became a headquarters for food and clothing. The rectory had been built in 1841 and “stood the shock well,” and though the church had been damaged, it would recover. Soon after the blast, men of the parish set to putting things right again. He felt frustrated, though, by the relief committee’s efforts, and believed the distribution of goods should have been “more equitable.”
For the minister himself, faith — and perhaps experience — must have played a role in his own personal recovery, for he had seen disaster before. In April 1912, when the Titanic had sunk on its first voyage across the Atlantic, Cunningham had traveled out to the scene with an undertaker and an embalmer on board the Minia. More than 300 bodies had already been pulled from the sea by the first ship called on, and the Minia was brought in to assist in the grim, overwhelming mission.
As with the Halifax Explosion, bad weather interfered. At one point, the ship’s captain, William de Carteret, reported:
Joseph Fynney was one of 17 bodies recovered by the Minia after the sinking of the Titanic.
Returned to position last night during east gale and fog, and searched all day; found no bodies; omitted giving you following:
Joseph Finney, second class, rubber merchant, Brown Building, Liverpool.
Thomas Mullin, Badge 32, steward.
Have searched from latitude 49.25 eastward to 48 and north from 41.20 to 41.50. No doubt some single bodies remain; no groups. As they cannot be seen more than half a mile, you will understand how difficult it is to search every square mile for them. Regret must leave Friday night, but will make another search tomorrow. Passed one body during dense fog; unable to find it afterward.
A more intimate letter was written by Francis Dyke, an electrician on board, who confided to his mother back in England, “I honestly hope I will never have to come on another expedition like this as it is far from pleasant. The Dr. and I are sleeping in the middle of 14 coffins (for the time being) they are all stacked around our quarters aft. … When we passed over the spot where the Titanic sank [Reverend Cunningham] held a short service in the saloon which I thought was very nice of him. I expected to see the poor creatures very disfigured but they all looked calm as if they were asleep.”
In picturing the crew out searching, I’m reminded that this story connects to our own family history. Somewhere in the water, never recovered, were the bodies of Reverend Ernest Courtenay Carter and his wife Lilian, who ran the church our grandmother’s family attended in Whitechapel. Two years earlier, our grandmother Doris Lilian had been named after Mrs. Carter, and baptized in the church.
After a week on board, the Minia’s crew had recovered only 17 bodies. They returned to Halifax Harbour, giving over the empty coffins to yet another rescue ship. The individual notes taken for each person found — clues to their identities — make for heartbreaking reading: Large prominent nose, silver cufflinks marked “E. K.” … Light brown hair, light eyebrows. … Short fingernails. (Looks as if he has been in the habit of biting them.) Letters, coins, buttons, handkerchiefs, keys, cigar cases, pocket watches — all were inspected and catalogued in the hope of identifying the dead.
Hearses lined up on Halifax Wharf, ready to receive recovered Titanic victims. Nova Scotia Archives.
Henry Ward Cunningham lived out the rest of his life in Halifax. One wonders what he thought when he recalled these two events, such enormous moments in history. A third event — more obscure but somehow a match for the others — occurred decades earlier, when he was just 18 and studying in England. The Frome Times reported:
Monday morning in last week, as a number of the S. Boniface College students were skating on Sheerwater, a sudden cry of alarm from one of their number, announced the startling fact that a portion of the ice had given way, and that a student named Mr. Laughlin had fallen into the water and disappeared beneath the ice. One of his fellow students, Mr. Cunningham, being an expert skater, soon arrived at the spot, and after trying in vain to reach him from the top of the ice, immediately dived into the water, but being unable to see him the first time, he was obliged to swim to the shore through the ice, which happened just there to be very thin, and then for the second time, without giving himself time to divest himself of any garment, he again pluckily went the rescue, plunging into the water and under the ice after his drowning fellow student. We are glad to be able to say that after some difficulty and severe bodily exertion on his part, he brought the fast drowning student to shore, who by this time had lost consciousness. The usual restoratives were applied by Mr. Wilcox, and we are glad to be able to say that neither the rescuer nor the rescued are now any the worse. We have no hesitation in saying that had it not been for the great bravery displayed by Mr. Cunningham, Mr. Laughlin would most certainly have been drowned.
Soon after, Cunningham was awarded the Royal Humane Society’s silver medallion, and that old memory may have come to mind years later when he was presented with a deck chair recovered from the Titanic. A haunting gift, I would think, for who had sat in that chair and what had become of them? Twenty-five of Cunningham’s parishioners died in the Halifax Explosion, but he remained at the church for many years. He and his wife both died in 1943, and were buried in St. John’s Cemetery, where many of the explosion victims were also interred.
Reverend Henry Ward Cunningham in St. George’s Rectory. The image was captured in 1937, 20 years after the Halifax Explosion. Nova Scotia Archives.
“We all sympathize with you in your great affliction…”
In Part 1 of Hugh Russell’s story (see also Part 2), I recounted Hugh’s early years and his arrival in Canada with the Barnardo’s organization in 1906. I mentioned, too, that his sister Ethel followed with the same organization in 1908, and that his brother, Robert, came in 1912. What prompted parents Thomas and Sarah Russell, the coppersmith and weaver from Belfast, to send their young children away? I haven’t quite got to the bottom of this, but I have been able to find out a little more about Ethel and Robert.
This passport picture of my grandmother, Doris Deverill, comes to mind as I work on Ethel’s story. Doris was the inspiration for The Cowkeeper’s Wish, and came to Canada in the care of a woman who became like a mother to her. Doris’s parents had died, and if not for Bebbie, a dear family friend, Doris could easily have been a British home child.
In March 1908, when 10-year-old Ethel Baker Russell arrived on board the Dominion, the Montreal Gazette reported that of the ship’s 1,000 passengers, 250 of them were Barnardo’s children, and that “It is expected that fully 1,200 children will be brought to Canada during the coming season. The demand for these children far exceeds the supply.”
On the 1911 census, Ethel appears as a domestic helper in Mono Mills, Ontario, near Orangeville, with the farmer George Crozier and his family. It’s most certainly her, because the same address is given in 1916 on Hugh’s service record, stipulating that some of his pay go to “E. Russell.” And then in 1917, when he is visiting the Wrays while still receiving care at Cobourg, a tiny notice in a newspaper says that “Ethel Russell of Orangeville is visiting her brother, Pte. Hugh Russell, at Mr. Jas. Wray’s 6th conc.” So Ethel and Hugh were in touch, at least in those years. In 1921, a woman of more or less the right age and particulars appears, boarding at the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in St. Catharine’s. But after that, I lose track of possibilities.
Brother Robert and the children’s parents, Sarah and Thomas, are even more elusive. In 1911, a boy of the right name and age appears in the care of a widow named Eliza James, living in Bedfordshire. This seemed a stretch at first, but I noticed that another boy was also living there as a boarder — nine-year-old Thomas Biddulph — and that both Thomas and Robert appear on a 1912 Barnardo’s passenger list to Canada. Furthermore, the 1901 census reveals that Eliza’s household included a five- and six-year-old boy whose birthplaces were unknown and who were “from Barnardo’s home.” So it makes sense that ten years later she would have two more such boarders.
Transcriptions of Barnardo’s Ups & Downs magazine show that Robert was employed by John Mitchell in Bolton, Ontario, but after that, just as with Ethel, I lose track of him, and so far there is no way of knowing whether Robert was ever reunited with his siblings. He was the youngest of the three — just seven when Hugh left — and may have had few memories of his older brother. Come to think of it, the family may well have been separated before Hugh emigrated. The last evidence of them living together is in 1901 in Birkenhead, when the census was taken.
Now, back to Hugh’s story.
Hugh Russell, Wingham Advance
On his first visit back to the Wray farm in 1917 when he was still a shell-shock patient at Cobourg, neighbours and friends held a party “to do honour to Private Hugh Russell.” He was presented with a watch, chain and locket, and one of the guests read out an address that was published in the local paper:
We, your neighbours and friends … bid you a cordial welcome back to the land of your adoption. We are proud of every loyal son but our hearts go out more particularly to you [whom] we have known and respected, and would therefore ask you to accept this watch and chain as a slight token of our esteem for you. While we are overjoyed to have you with us again, we all sympathize with you in your great affliction, but trust that An-all-wise-Providence will see fit to restore your speech to you. Although for lack of forethought we did not acknowledge your bravery when you enlisted alone and went to London to train yet we followed you with our prayers and best wishes and our fervent prayer now is that you may long be spared to enjoy the comforts of life . …
Not surprisingly, Hugh returned to the Wingham area. All evidence suggests he had a warm and supportive community there, and a great bond with Graham Wray, the only son of the couple who’d taken Hugh in back in 1906. Wray family stories and newspaper accounts say that Hugh carried a pencil and paper with him so that he could communicate with people. But soon there came a time when he didn’t need it any longer.
In September 1918, the Wingham Advance reported:
Hugh Russell, an Irish home boy, who has for several years worked with farmers in Turnberry and who has been unable to utter a word for the past two years, has regained his speech. On the 14th of September, 1916, Pte. Russell was shell shocked and for several days lay unconscious. When he finally came to, his speech was gone. He was for a time in English Hospitals but returned to Canada on June 30th, 1917. He spent the winter in Wingham and has for some time been employed with Mr. R. J. Breen, Turnberry. He was taking his horse to Toronto exhibition when she scared while in the car and Hugh very excitedly shouted “Whoa” much to his own delight and astonishment. Mr. Edgar Higgins saw him in Toronto and spoke to him when much to his surprise he answered by voice instead of by pencil.”
It’s interesting how often Hugh’s connection with horses weaves into his story. A family anecdote says that Hugh took a job looking after wild horses that were brought to Ontario from the west by train. The horses were loaded into train cars, shipped a certain distance, and then side-lined for a period of time to rest, since they were standing all the while. It was Hugh’s job to feed, water and walk the horses, and prepare them for the next part of a long and no doubt frightening trip. Hugh was out west doing this work when James Wray died in 1931. The family story goes that the Wrays were unable to reach him, and when he returned home, he learned the sad news, and that he’d missed the funeral.
This job of Hugh’s sent me down another rabbit hole as I tried to imagine him tending wild horses, and also why the horses were brought from the west and what became of them. A 1925 article in the Quesnel Cariboo Observer described them as beautiful creatures roaming “vast rangy land,” through sage and cactus hills, open, grassy plateaus, and rugged mountains. “Every conceivable colour is represented in their shining coats in summer, from the beautiful jet-blacks to the white-eyed, mouse-colored pintos.” Despite a hard life in the wild, facing starvation, cold winters, inbreeding, and men with guns, the wild-horse population had increased to such an extent that ranchers considered them pests, and a bounty system was introduced in British Columbia in 1924. According to Horse-Canada Magazine, some 10,000 horses were killed by bounty hunters in B.C. between the 1920s and 1940s.
The Quesnel Cariboo article describes the job of chasing wild horses as “dangerous, spectacular, thrilling,” and also “the poorest paid hard work on earth. … There have been for many years a number of white men who do practically nothing else the year round but chase wild horses. It is not very remunerative, but the love of the chase holds them. Next to ice hockey it is the most thrilling sport and hardest work that I know of; it seems to grip and hold one, and the love of it grows on a person worse than the drink habit.” One wonders what Hugh made of these horses as he cared them for them post-capture.
In 1937, 20 years after his shell shock diagnosis, he was living at another farm when he went missing one Sunday in July. He was described in the press as 42 years old, very thin, with jet black hair, horn-rimmed spectacles and a swarthy complexion. He’d acted strangely at dinner, said the farmer he worked for, and after finishing his meal, had walked in the direction of the nearby swamp. The farmer thought he was suffering from a bout of melancholia, but called the police when he didn’t turn up the next day, fearing Hugh was experiencing memory loss and “a recurrence of shell shock.”
The day after that, the Windsor Star reported that police had found evidence that “Former Barnardo Home Boy Had Bedded Down in Bog.” So as in his soldier days, he had slept outside, under the stars. Before long, he turned up at the Wray home. What happened after that only raises more questions, for when Mrs. Wray saw him, she called police, and he immediately disappeared again. When police finally caught up with him a day later, he claimed he wasn’t Hugh Russell, then “broke for a nearby bush and disappeared. The bush consists of more than 1,000 acres and will, it is believed, afford him a haven until he re-appears of his own accord.” I could find no more articles about the incident after that, and curiously none of the articles I found about the disappearance were published in the Wingham Advance, which had so often mentioned Hugh in earlier years.
One more puzzling detail comes from family members: apparently when people went out looking for Hugh during this time, a woman told them that someone had approached her with a pad and pencil, asking for directions to the Wray farm. So had Hugh lost his voice again? Or has the story become muddled over time? As Tracy and I often found when writing The Cowkeeper’s Wish, the more answers you have, the more questions you have.
What was Hugh running from? Was there some strange behaviour that prompted Mrs. Wray to call the police? Had he suffered from melancholia, memory loss and “recurrence of shell shock” at other times through the postwar years? What, if anything, brought relief? Wray family members recall that Graham — “a real gentleman” — always stayed in touch with “Hughie,” and thought of him as an older brother. When Graham’s three girls were young in the 1940s, he’d bring them to visit Hugh in London, Ontario, where he’d moved sometime after his mysterious disappearance. London street directories place him at various addresses from the early 1940s until 1970, living alone in a rented room. Early on he worked in a hosiery factory, then as a watchman, and eventually at the veterans’ hospital. Why did this horse-loving farm hand move to the city? I can’t help thinking that his 1937 disappearance holds the key — that perhaps he entered the veterans’ hospital for care, and afterwards stayed in the city. But I may well be wrong.
Though he died in London, he was brought back to Wingham for burial in the Wingham Cemetery, where Graham Wray and his parents lie. The London Free Press ran a spare obituary that makes no mention of his sister or brother, but holds one poignant detail: Survived by a close friend, Graham Wray.
Last time, I told you about the early years of Hugh Willis Russell, who came to Canada at age 11 with the Barnardo’s organization, and landed in Wingham, Ontario, only to cross the ocean again in 1915 as a soldier. In January 1916, in a letter to young Graham Wray, the son of the farmer Hugh worked for, Hugh claimed war was “a great life,” and that soon he’d be able to “kill a lot of Germans.” But his enthusiasm for war quickly diminished.
It’s interesting to note that when Hugh first enlisted, he was described as having no distinguishing marks or tattoos, but at some point overseas, he had a horse’s head and a horseshoe tattooed on his forearm. His love of horses is evident in his letters home to Graham, some of which were published in the Wingham Advance. In February 1916, from “Somewhere in Belgium,” he writes:
I am longing for a pair of horses to drive. I think I will see my CO and ask him if I can transfer into some unit where I can get a horse to look after. I always had a great fancy for Judy, and I used to take a great interest in her, and paid the best attention to her care and comfort. You never knew how sorry I was the day your father took her out of the gate for the last time. If I ever see her again I will be tempted to buy her. I think she would know me. … Well, I had better quit, or else I will be thinking there is no war on, and I am back in Canada trading horses.
From your old friend, Hugh
PS — Here is a song we sing in the trenches: Sing me to sleep where the bullets fall; let me forget the war and all. Damp is my dug-out, cold are my feet, waiting for someone to sing me to sleep.
Pack horses transporting ammunition, April 1917. Library and Archives Canada. Department of National Defence Collection 1964-114 PA-001229
For a horse-lover especially, it must have been dismaying to see up close what war did to these animals. Millions of horses were requisitioned for war work. They were lifted by cranes onto ships that carried them across the ocean. Sometimes they didn’t survive that terrifying journey. Those that made it were used in cavalry charges, or to transport messengers, supplies or equipment, or pull heavy artillery and loads of wounded. Large and vulnerable, truly beasts of burden, they perished in mind-boggling numbers – some sources say eight million died in battle, at sea, or of illness, disease, exhaustion, or poison gas. One soldier wrote that horses, too, suffered trauma, and would sometimes “shiver, tremble all over, and break out in a sweat” when the shelling started. Seeing horses injured was “worse than seeing men cut up. The men have an idea what it is all about but the horses have to take it as it comes and say nothing.”
Horses killed by shell fire during Allied advance on Monastir, November, 1916. Q 32874, IWM.
In March, Hugh wrote to Graham:
Well that was quite an accident you had while you were on your way to bid farewell to your old neighbours, I am glad to hear you both got off safely. It was certainly a good thing that you didn’t have [the horse] Pete, or I am afraid it would have been the worst for you. It seems a person is in danger wherever he is. You make me homesick when you speak of dealing horses and cattle and of someone getting married. I often dream I am back there working at one thing or other, and it all seems real, and I forget there ever was a war until a big gun firing or mine blowing up awakens me, and I remember I am still here in Flanders and the enemy is still there. … Well I guess this is all I can say this time, hoping to see you all soon. I will say good-bye.
Your loving friend, Hugh
In August, another letter arrived, saying “we have been up against it pretty hard this last three months,” but “I am getting used to these Belgian horrors now.” Even the time out of the trenches was gruelling, he told Graham, “for they keep drilling us all the time.” But he got great joy out of a horse show put on for the men a few days before writing. “Just think,” he wrote with wonder, “a real horse show within range of the German guns,” and went on to describe the events and the prizes in detail. There was “a Charlie Chaplin” in the ring too — presumably someone impersonating the popular star, and who brought some much-needed comic relief. He closed the letter with his regular refrain, “so hoping to see you all some day soon,” and included a drawing from the trenches, which unfortunately was not reproduced for readers of the Wingham Advance.
Together the letters from Hugh to Graham form a picture of a bright, thoughtful, articulate young man who’d developed close attachments not just to the family who’d taken him in, but to his wider community of Turnberry and Wingham in Huron County. So it’s no surprise that in September, during the Battle of the Somme, the paper reported “Turnberry Boy Falls,” as though Hugh was one of their own.
Word was received here that Pte. Hugh W. Russell 54180 had been admitted to 2nd Western General Hospital, Bristol, England, suffering from severe shell shock. Hugh had made his home for some time with Mr. and Mrs. Jas. Wray, 6th con. of Turnberry and no parents could be kinder or think more of him. He went to London from Wingham on Feb. 1st, 1915, and enlisted with the 18th Batt. … At the time he was wounded he had served over a year in the trenches. … Hugh was well liked by a wide circle of friends who hope he may recover and come back to old Huron again.
The Last Message by William Hatherell, 1918. (Art.IWM ART 5234), Imperial War Museum.
Hugh’s case was indeed severe. His record shows that he was unconscious for three days, and when he woke, he couldn’t speak or walk. He was invalided to England, where the doctors had a low opinion of his overall intelligence, which seems at odds with his letters and must have been due to his trauma. He received various forms of treatment to help him regain his speech, but the words didn’t come.
According to the British psychiatrist Frederick Mott, the treatment for mutism from shell shock was often quick and simple. “The patient, after a careful and thorough examination, is assured that he will be cured of his disability. … he is asked to produce sounds, to cough, to whistle, to say the vowel sounds, which he will probably not be able to do. The voice may return by suggestion only. But a more rapid method is to reinforce suggestion by the application of the faradic current to the neck by means of a roller electrode or brush. The current is increased in strength and very often the patient immediately recovers his voice and speaks.”
Early notes from Hugh’s time at a hospital in Bristol suggest that these methods were attempted, and eventually he could walk again, and whistle “a trifle,” and place his lips into the shapes necessary to form sounds. But though he understood all that was said to him, he shook his head when asked to speak. “Lies half asleep most of the time – is not anxious to communicate with anyone.” He had ferocious headaches and insomnia, and then nightmares when he did manage to sleep. Notes in his file show that treatment included anaesthesia, hypnotism, and electric shock therapy, but that there was “no effect except to terrify him.”
Theories varied as to what was at the root of these men’s troubles, and changed over time. Were their symptoms a result of a physical shock to the system brought on by heavy bombardment – a “sudden jarring of the mental machinery,” as the nurse Dora Vine put it? Or were these men of cowardly, weak stock to begin with, and so made poor soldiers? Or were they suffering mental trauma from prolonged exposure to stressful conditions? Approaches to curing them ranged from gentle and nurturing to shockingly harsh, and doctors often disagreed with each other about what patients needed. Canadian psychiatrist Lewis Yealland, working in England during the war, described electricity as “the great sheet anchor” in cases of mutism, and claimed a 100-percent success rate. In his 1918 book Hysterical Disorders of Warfare, he laid out the case of a 24-year-old patient who’d been mute for nine months.
Many attempts had been made to cure him. He had been strapped down in a chair for twenty minutes at a time, then strong electricity was applied to his neck and throat; lighted cigarette ends had been applied to the tip of his tongue and ‘hot plates’ had been placed at the back of his mouth. Hypnotism had been tried. But all these methods proved to be unsuccessful in restoring his voice. When I asked him if he wished to be cured he smiled indifferently. I said to him: ‘… You appear to me to be very indifferent, but that will not do in times such as these.’ … In the evening he was taken to the electrical room, the blinds drawn, the lights turned out, and the doors leading into the room were locked and the keys removed. The only light perceptible was that from the resistance bulbs of the battery. Placing the pad electrode on the lumbar spines and attaching the long pharyngeal electrode, I said to him, ‘You will not leave this room until you are talking as well as you ever did; no, not before.’ The mouth was kept open by means of a tongue depressor; a strong faradic current was applied to the posterior wall of the pharynx, and with this stimulus he jumped backwards, detaching the wires from the battery. ‘Remember, you must behave as becomes the hero I expect you to be,’ I said. ‘A man who has gone through so many battles should have better control of himself.’ Then I placed him in a position from which he could not release himself and repeated, ‘You must talk before you leave me.’ A weaker faradic current was then applied more or less continuously, during which time I kept repeating, ‘Nod to me when you are ready to attempt to speak.’ This current was persevered with for one hour with as few intervals as were necessary, and at the end of that time he could whisper ‘ah.’ With this return of speech I said: ‘Do you realise that there is already an improvement? … You will believe me when I tell you that you will be talking before long.’ I continued with the use of electricity for half an hour longer, and during that time I constantly persuaded him to say ‘ah, bah, cah,’ but ‘ah’ was only repeated. It was difficult for me to keep his attention, as he was becoming tired; and unless I was constantly commanding him his head would nod and his eyes close. To overcome this I ordered him to walk up and down the room, and as I walked with him urged him to repeat the vowel sounds. At one time when he became sulky and discouraged he made an attempt to leave the room, but his hopes were frustrated by my saying to him, ‘Such an idea as leaving me now is most ridiculous; you cannot leave the room, the doors are locked and the keys are in my pocket. You will leave when you are cured, remember, not before.’
As the treatment went on, the patient wept and finally whispered for water, which was denied until a louder sound could be made, brought about by the use of a stronger current. “I don’t want to hurt you,” Yealland’s recounting goes, “but, if necessary, I must.” After four hours’ continuous treatment, the man was deemed cured.
It’s impossible to know the specifics of Hugh Russell’s treatment now, and one can only hope he endured nothing as horrible as the case above. By the time he was moved to another hospital in February 1917, he was still not speaking, but gradually he began to improve in other ways. He slept and ate well, and began “regaining confidence,” though he still had headaches and nightmares. “Is now employed about the stables,” a doctor wrote in April. “General condition is good. His general nervousness and fear of MO’s is disappearing.” As an aside, presumably to explain the fear of medical officers, the doctor added, “(He was frightened of former methods to) …” but the sentence is unfinished, and the following page, if there was one, is missing from Hugh’s file. “Has been to several horse races,” the doctor wrote a month later. “Did not speak even under excitement.”
Whatever happened to Hugh with the aim of curing him, he wanted no more of it. When he arrived back in Canada in the summer of 1917 and entered the mental hospital in Cobourg – an asylum taken over for military purposes – his picture appeared in the Wingham Advance, surely submitted by the Wrays. “As soon as was possible,” the paper reported, “he received a week’s leave in order to visit with Mr. and Mrs. Jas. Wray …, with whom he made his home before enlisting. They have been all to him that parents could be to any boy.” He stayed at Cobourg until December, silent all the while. “At present his only trouble is complete loss of voice,” the doctor there wrote, “and he refuses any treatment for this, says he was tortured enough in England by treatment. … This man is anxious for his discharge. … He should pass under his own control.”
And so Hugh was discharged from the army and left to pick up the pieces of his life. In the next post, I’ll try to put together what happened to him in the ensuing years, leading up the 1930s when he disappeared from the farm he was working on. I’ll also touch a little more on his brother and sister, Barnardo’s kids too, and whether the siblings stayed in touch with one another over the years.
Wingham, Ontario, around 1910, courtesy McCord Museum
I’ve mentioned before that I’m currently working on a new book about WW1 soldiers and medical staff returning to Canada after the war. The book is non-fiction, though not family-related this time, however the research chops Tracy and I acquired writing The Cowkeeper’s Wish have come in extremely handy for this new project. Sometimes the stories are so fascinating I go down rabbit holes and disappear for great lengths of time.
So it went when I came across an article about a man named Hugh Russell. I was on a mission to find out more about shell shock — what we would now call PTSD — and how men grappled with it for years after the war was over. In a newspaper archive, I found a 1937 article about a veteran having gone missing from the farm he was working on near Wingham, Ontario. The Windsor Star reported:
Fear that Hugh Russell, 42-year-old farmhand and returned soldier, is lost in a treacherous swamp in what is known here as the Alps, is being entertained here today. Russell was said to have been acting strangely when he disappeared from the home of his employer, Nelson Pickells, Sunday night, and when he did not return to his work yesterday morning, a search of the swamp in the vicinity of the Pickells farm showed he had slept in the swamp overnight. It is feared he may be suffering a recurrence of shell shock. The farm is on the Alps in the Township of Culross, in a district where there is particularly treacherous land with many morasses and bog holes. Russell, a former Barnardo Home boy, and said to have suffered shell shock during the war, came to work for Nelson Pickells last Christmas. He ate his dinner on Sunday night but, it is reported, acted in a strange manner and without any comment left after the meal for the swamp. The Pickells believed he was suffering melancholia, and did not worry until he failed to return. He is about five feet six inches tall, has jet black hair, a swarthy complexion, and is very thin. When he disappeared he was wearing a white helmet, dark overalls, a dark blue shirt and horn-rimmed spectacles.
The article made me curious to know more about Hugh Russell — his childhood as a “Barnardo boy,” his war experience, what treatment he might have had for shell shock, and how he’d reintegrated into society after the war. Of course I also wanted to know if he made it out of the swamp! So I started digging, and was quite amazed by the amount and the variety of material I found, sometimes with the help of strangers with a shared curiosity, sometimes from creative and persistent searching. Each piece fitted into another piece and added context to what was already there. I could write a whole series of posts explaining how these pieces emerged in a non-linear way, and how the genealogical sleuthing unfolded. But Hugh’s story is so touching that I think I’ll just tell it as I know it now, in chronological order.
Though his service record says he was born in March of 1895, Hugh Willis (elsewhere William) Russell was actually born on September 27, 1894, in Belfast, so perhaps he didn’t know his birthday. He was the eldest child of Thomas John Russell, a coppersmith, and Sarah Neeson, a weaver, who’d been married a year earlier. A few years later, they had a daughter, Ethel Baker Russell. The family lived at various addresses in Belfast in the 1890s, but by 1899, they’d moved to Birkenhead, Cheshire, a seaport town that looks across the River Mersey to Liverpool. There, a son named Robert George was born. The baptism record shows that Thomas was still a copper/tinsmith, as does the 1901 census record, which puts the family on Back St. Anne Street.
Encyclopaedia Britannica map, 1900
I’m still not certain what happened to Thomas and Sarah (though I have plenty of hunches!), but by 1906, Hugh was on his way to Canada in the care of Barnardo’s. Thomas John Barnardo was the founder and director of homes that took in poor children, beginning in the 1860s. For a glimpse of his philosophy, see his own book, Something Attempted, Something Done!
A group of “miserable street lads,” or what Barnardo called “the raw material,” from Something Attempted, Something Done!
For those unfamiliar with the home child scheme in general, Library and Archives Canada puts it this way:
Between 1869 and the late 1930s, over 100,000 juvenile migrants were sent to Canada from the British Isles during the child emigration movement. Motivated by social and economic forces, churches and philanthropic organizations sent orphaned, abandoned and pauper children to Canada. Many believed that these children would have a better chance for a healthy, moral life in rural Canada, where families welcomed them as a source of cheap farm labour and domestic help.
After arriving by ship, the children were sent to distributing and receiving homes, such as Fairknowe in Brockville, and then sent on to farmers in the area. Although many of the children were poorly treated and abused, others experienced a better life and job opportunities here than if they had remained in the urban slums of England. Many served with the Canadian and British Forces during both World Wars.
In the LAC’s Home Children database, I found Hugh, age 11, arriving on board the Dominion with 240 other children heading to uncertain futures in a foreign land. Many home children had horrible experiences. Even those who weren’t mistreated must have been devastated to leave their families at such a young age. As I mentioned in another post about a home child, many of these young men were among the first to enlist in WW1, in the hopes that they could get back to England to see their families again. (In 1908, Hugh’s sister Ethel arrived and was placed with a family in Orangeville; and in 1912, Robert came too, and went to Bolton. Like their brother, they’d come with the Barnardo’s organization. Why, and whether there were other children, I’m still not sure.)
From the Wellcome Library
Hugh was placed in Wingham, Ontario, with farmer James Wray and his wife, Martha, who had a little boy named Graham. James Wray kept horses, and it seems that Hugh developed a great love for them over the years. In various places, his service record labels him a horse trainer, trader and jockey. When he enlisted with the 18th Battalion in London in February 1915, he was still living with the Wrays. Graham would have been about 12 by then, and would not have remembered a time when Hugh wasn’t part of the household. Hugh’s service record describes him as 5’3″, fair-skinned, with blue eyes and dark brown hair. He had no distinctive marks or tattoos, and described his trade as “farmer.”
By April of 1915 he was on board the SS Grampian, heading back across the ocean, nine years after his arrival with Barnardo’s. He would have heard news, around this time, of the Battle of Ypres, and the Germans’ first use of poison gas to attack the enemy. Soon, gas masks were part of a soldier’s essential equipment, and a horse’s too.
Library and Archives Canada, PA-005001
A little of what Hugh experienced on the Western Front comes through in his letters home to Graham, which were occasionally published in the Wingham Advance. On January 2, 1916, from “Somewhere in Belgium,” he wrote:
Dear Graham … Well, it is still raining and the mud is getting deeper, I would much rather have the snow. It is certainly miserable with your feet wet all the time and we are all the time scraping off mud. But there is a good time coming and so we are trying to be cheerful until it comes. I don’t believe we will have another winter out here, I think there will be something doing in the spring. You see we can’t do much as there is so much mud and water. I am in the machine gun section now so I will likely have a chance to kill lots of Germans.
I suppose you had as merry a Christmas as ever, we were in the trenches that day, there was no firing and everything was quiet. We invited the Germans over to dinner, some of them started out but got scared before they got far and beat it back. We can [call out] to them and hear them answer but we can’t understand them. I think they are Prussians in front of us. They pump the water out of their trenches and it runs down into ours, so we have to keep pumping all the time. We have a bit time with the rats in this country they seem to be here in millions. They are all sizes and colours, sometimes when they jump up on the parapet they startle us for they look like a man coming over. They are very tame and we have to kick them out of the way, they often eat our rations and keep scratching and running about when we are trying to get to sleep and I guess they bother the Germans just the same.
This is a great life. After this I will be able to live back in the bush in a hole in the ground, I’ll hardly feel comfortable in a feather bed. I just get my clothes off every eighteen days that is to get a bath. Still we don’t mind it much and we have many a good laugh, you would think if you heard us sometimes that there was no war on at all. I don’t believe I could stay away from the boys very long now, we are so attached to each other although the old battalion is gradually changing into a different lot of faces. The half of them seem to be strangers to me now.
Well I guess when this is all this time. When you write again send my letter to machine gun section instead of B company. Hoping this year will see us all together again, I remain your old friend.
Hugh
The tone of Hugh’s letters changed as the months went on, and by September 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, Hugh was in no condition to write. But I’ll save that part of the story for next time, exploring Hugh’s war experience in more detail, as well as his love for horses, and his treatment in England for shell shock.
❤
With thanks to the London & Middlesex Branch of Ontario Ancestors’ facebook group, and in particular the tenacity of Cookie Foster. Appreciation also for the Huron County Museum’s wonderful collection of digitized newspapers, and Eric Edwards’ tireless 18th Battalion research. And with special thanks to Wray family descendants.
If you’ve gone down rabbit holes in search of elusive ancestors and found yourself in a maze-like world of tunnels and loops and switchbacks, you’ll understand the tale I’m about to share. Those of you who’ve read The Cowkeeper’s Wish will know who Jennie (Jane) is: one of the cowkeeper’s granddaughters, married in 1890 to a shoemaker named Richard Vanson, and our great-great aunt. Some of the Vanson story we’ve told in the book, and some in a previous post. They’re an interesting bunch. From a brush with the law to their connection with one of Jack the Ripper’s victims, this part of our family tree has skeletons aplenty in its closet, and I stumbled across a few more while trying to puzzle out what had become of Jennie and her daughters after Jennie’s husband Richard died of tuberculosis in 1911.
Jennie (Jane) Evans Vanson, circa 1904
For people of our family’s social standing, it wasn’t easy to be a widow in the early days of the 20th century, before pensions and social safety nets, and it was even harder if you had children to worry about. Two months after her husband’s death, forty-year-old Jennie wrote on the census form in a messy scrawl that she lived at 30 Burdett Chambers in Lambeth (the same address she’d shared with her shoemaker husband), along with two of her daughters: eighteen-year-old Florence, a tailoress, and the youngest, Ada, who was four. Jennie reported working as an office cleaner, and although she also wrote answers to the questions regarding her years of marriage and children, someone, presumably the enumerator, stroked through the numbers with a heavy pen, since as a widow she need not have recorded them. But the information she’d penned remained legible, and what I read offered no surprises: she’d been married for twenty years, and had borne six children, of whom four were living and two were dead. A further census search revealed that her other surviving daughters, Nellie Jane and Alice, resided nearby. The eldest, nineteen-year-old Nellie Jane, lived at 45 Trinity Square in the neighbouring Borough, in the home of John Alexander, a surgeon and clinical assistant at the Evelina Hospital for Children. Dr. Alexander had taken over the practice operated at the Trinity Square address by his father, Charles Linton Alexander, who had died in 1887. Nellie Jane was John Alexander’s “general servant, domestic”, so her day was spent sweeping, dusting, scrubbing, laying fires and serving at mealtimes.
I found Jennie’s other daughter Alice, also nearby, living with her uncle George Vanson, his wife Edith and their daughter Isabel a few blocks east along Waterloo Road from Burdett Street. Despite her young age, fourteen-year-old Alice had a more unusual job than her sisters or her mother, employed as an apprentice perruquier (wig-maker) for H&M Rayne, a company that made costumes for the theatre industry.
Alice worked as a perruquier, making wigs for the theatre. Her cousin Isabel worked as a costume maker.
Cousin Isabel, a couple of years older, also worked for Rayne, learning the skill of costume-making. H&M Rayne was headquartered just steps from Uncle George’s Webber Row address in Lambeth, so given the close proximity of the costumier, living with her Uncle George was a sensible choice for Alice.
If Alice and Isabel’s jobs sound interesting, Uncle George and Aunt Edith’s were more mundane. George was a dock worker, one of thousands of casual, unskilled labourers whose livelihood depended on what work was available when he showed up at the docks each morning hoping to be selected for a crew. A docker’s work was hard, dirty, and poorly paid, and a shift might last an hour or two, or stretch into the night, and depending on the cargo – lead, asbestos, fertilizers – could be dangerous. Edith toiled as a charwoman, an occupation not unlike George’s in that it was hard work and the pay meagre. To be a char was to be at the bottom of the domestic service hierarchy, and for most women, charing was a last resort before knocking on the workhouse door. George and Edith were barely getting by, so Alice and Isabel’s income was surely welcome.
George worked as a labourer on the London docks, one of many of the unskilled poor.
Edith was about thirteen years older than George, and he was her second husband. Her first, Frank Pitcher, had been an inmate at Cane Hill Asylum, a place that readers of The Cowkeeper’s Wish will be familiar with. Admitted in 1888 when Frank and Edith had been married eighteen years, his admittance documents say he’d been “getting gradually worse for four years” and that he’d been “living apart” from Edith for some time. Poor Law records describe him as a “lunatic” who refused medicine, and occasionally food, believing them to be poisoned. He wandered aimlessly, his case notes state, required constant supervision and was “very wet and dirty night and day.” The casebook also revealed that his next-of-kin was his stepmother, as his wife’s whereabouts were unknown.
But in fact, Edith hadn’t gone far. I found her in 1891, living with her children in St Margaret’s Court, a street described by social investigators as “a bad quarter,” and yet also “a little village by itself” with a “brave show of flowers at west end.” St. Margaret’s Court was one of many narrow passages that led off Red Cross Street in Southwark where Jennie Vanson resided, newly wed to Richard, and was presumably where Edith was still living when she met Richard’s brother, George. Frank Pitcher remained a lunatic asylum inmate until his death in 1893, and three years after he died, in 1896, Edith married George Vanson. In my search for the trail of Jennie and her daughters, the coincidence of Cane Hill was interesting, but other than that, I dismissed George and Edith as just another of many poor couples that connected tangentially to The Cowkeeper’s Wish. But in fact the lives of George and Edith and Jennie and her daughters would be inextricably linked, and as I traced the path of the Vanson women, George would insistently appear, and eventually take on a new importance.
The area around St. Margaret’s Court, where Edith lived, was considered “a bad quarter,” but there was “a brave show of flowers in boxes at westend.” Image courtesy of Charles Booth’s London booth.lse.ac.uk
After finding Jennie and her girls on the 1911 census, and relegating the story of George and Edith to a sidebar, things got complicated. I looked for anything that would move the Vanson women forward in time, and discovered that Alice, our young perruquier, married in 1918 to an older man named Arthur Polley and moved to northeast London, where Arthur had his own business as a retail grocer. Ada, just four years old in 1911, married Edward McCarthy in 1932, and Florence, the tailoress, wed Fred Thomas, a carman, in 1914, and had at least two children, both born during the war years.
All of Jennie’s daughters, then, except the oldest, Nellie Jane, who’d worked for the doctor in Trinity Square, were so far accounted for. Nellie Jane proved somewhat trickier. In my hunt for her I came across a 1936 marriage index entry for a 45-year-old Nellie Jane Vanson and a 36-year-old Reginald Thomas Sanson in Eastbourne, Sussex. At first it seemed silly given the rhyme of the last names and Nellie’s age, and what on earth would a Vanson girl, come from generations of working class Londoners, be doing in a resort town on England’s south coast? Surely it wasn’t Jennie’s daughter. But then I found a death index entry in Eastbourne for a Jane Vanson, age 84 in 1955 (so born in 1871 as was our Jennie), and I reconsidered the Vanson-Sansons.
The Eastbourne Pier and promenade. Nellie Jane married Reginald Sanson in Eastbourne in 1936.
Eastbourne in the 1930s wasn’t a very big place, and I reasoned that if Jennie had died there in 1955 there might have been an obituary placed in the local paper, and it might tell me if I had the right woman. I wrote to the cemetery board in Eastbourne to ask about Jane Vanson’s burial record, and I wrote to the Eastbourne Library (which holds the Eastbourne Herald newspaper archives) to see if they could find an obituary. Both replied, and from the cemetery board I learned the exact date of death and an address on Cavendish Avenue, Eastbourne, and from the library I received an obituary for Nellie Jane that gave the same address. Things were falling into place, and it certainly seemed that this was our Jennie and her oldest daughter Nellie Jane. But how had they come to be in Eastbourne, and when, and had they come together? Was it just Nellie Jane and Jennie or was other family in Eastbourne too?
I went back to the Electoral Rolls for London and continued to fill in the missing years, first coming across Flo and Fred in 1919 (with Fred’s rank, regiment and serial number, so he’d been in the Great War) at #2 Brigade House, Southwark Bridge Road. Brigade House was part of the London Fire Brigade’s Southwark headquarters, so perhaps Fred’s job as a carman meant he drove one of the horse and wagon fire engines. In 1929, Flo’s Uncle George, the dockworker, husband of Edith, suddenly popped up at their Brigade House address. But by 1933, Fred was alone at #2. No Flo, no George. Within two years, Fred had a new partner at #2, so maybe Flo died, although I’ve found no death record that matched. George, too, was gone, but he turned up at Rowton House, a hostel for down and out men on Churchyard Row, behind St Gabriel Street in Newington.
Rowton House, Newington Butts, a lodging house where George Vanson lived for thirteen years.
That George’s circumstances were so reduced was a sad turn of events, and yet things might have been much worse. The Rowton House lodging houses were the best of what was available in terms of shelter for vagrants and poor single men according to the author George Orwell, who’d written from personal experience of homelessness in London in 1933. The facility where George lived had been built in 1897, the third such structure of its kind erected by Montagu Corry, 1st Baron Rowton. Lord Rowton had sought to improve the lot of poor single working men whose choices, if they had no home of their own, had ranged from filthy, bug-infested dosshouses and spartan hostels to penny sit-ups, where a penny bought a man a spot on a bench in a warm building, but did not allow him to lie down, to a park bench with the likelihood of a constable prodding him to move along.
One of the cubicles at Rowton House where a man could pay weekly in advance to keep his room.
When Rowton House in Newington Butts opened on Christmas Eve in 1897, there were 805 private sleeping cubicles with sheets, blankets, a quilt and a chamber pot, and pegs on which a fellow could hang his trousers. There were bathing facilities and lavatories in the basement, and a dining room on the ground floor that seated 400. A hot meal could be had for pennies, or a man could cook his own. There was a reading and smoking room, a barber and a tailor and a shoemaker. A man could pay for his room a week at a time in advance, and guarantee his spot, or he could take his chances and hope for a room, paying nightly. The newspapers of the day were impressed with Rowton House, and soon after the Newington location opened its doors, the South London Chronicle wrote that “the utmost good fellowship prevailed” among the inmates, and “the bill of fare [on Christmas Day] would not have shamed a high-class restaurant.”
By the time George became a resident in 1932, a wing had been added, increasing Rowton’s capacity by several hundred beds. On a night with a full house, George’s snores would have joined in a chorus with more than 1,000 other souls tucked into tiny cubicles over six floors. An account written in 1935 for The Sunderland Echo gives an idea of what life was like in Rowton House for George and men like him, past seventy and likely living on the pittance of a government Old Age Pension. He’d have kept the same room at the hostel by paying the weekly amount, and for a few more shillings he had the option of renting a locker where he could store his few possessions. In the morning, a bell-ringer travelled the hallways rousing George and the rest of the residents from their cubicles, and after a wash at the basins in the basement he and some of the other Rowton men gathered in the dining hall, making tea if they had a bit of leaf and a pot and a cup stowed in their locker, or purchasing porridge, a boiled egg and toast for a penny from the canteen. After breakfast, George might have spent some of the day in the smoking room – being illiterate he’d have had no use for the books in the reading room, and all Rowton Houses had strict rules against card playing. If the weather was fair, perhaps he’d have taken a stroll and sat for an hour on a bench in the sun before returning to Rowton in time for the evening meal. Afterwards, those with a few extra coins in their pocket would sally forth to the pubs for a pint. Those without money to spare had an early night in their cubicles. The Sunderland Echo reporter, when he’d arrived at the hostel to research his article, had received a warning from one of the officials at the house: “Keep to yourself, chum; there’s some queer men in here.” And yet the writer found the Rowton House inmates to be mostly “respectable working men, quietly dressed,” even if one or two “showed their toes sticking through the ends of their boots.”
The “penny sit-up” was at least shelter for the night, but there was no lying down, and likely no sleeping either.
George lived at Rowton House for thirteen years, a spartan existence toward the end of a life that had held few comforts. I wanted to know more about how he got there. In 1911 he’d been working the docks and sharing his roof with wife Edith, daughter Isabel, and niece Alice, the apprentice perruquier. In 1929 he was presumably a boarder with another niece, Alice’s sister Flo and her husband Fred. Where had George been in the years in between?
A further search located George on the Land Tax register for 1916, renting a house in St Gabriel Street, Newington Butts, a short stroll from Rowton House. The 1918 Electoral Rolls confirmed the address, and also offered the surprise of his sister-in-law, our Jennie, the mother of Flo and Alice, living with him. I was intrigued. Had George’s wife Edith died? If so, I could find no recent record. I checked for a marriage record for George and his brother’s widow, but found nothing there either. George would have been 55 and Jennie 42 in 1918, and I supposed their co-habitation could have simply been a platonic arrangement of convenience, two middle-aged relatives with next to no money supporting one another in shared lodgings. The Electoral Rolls confirmed that this relationship, whatever it was, continued until 1929, when 66-year-old George turned up at Flo and Fred’s. Did Jennie kick him out? Or did George leave on his own? And after all that time, why?
Those kinds of questions are likely never to be answered one hundred years on, and yet, it’s difficult to stop looking. I turned my focus back to Eastbourne and discovered that another of Jennie’s children, Alice, the one-time perruquier who’d married the greengrocer Arthur Polley, had also moved to Eastbourne. In 1939, the couple had still been running their grocery in northeast London, but the 1948 Kelly’s Street Directory for Eastbourne yielded an address for Arthur and Alice just a few doors down from Nellie Jane and Reginald Sanson’s Cavendish Avenue address in Eastbourne. When he died in 1951, Arthur was relatively young at just 63. Perhaps he’d been unwell, and he and Alice had moved to the seaside for his health. That left Jennie and Ada in London.
Ada, Jennie’s youngest, had been not quite five years old when her father Richard died of tuberculosis. Most likely she barely remembered him. The man to feature more prominently in her life as a father figure had been her uncle George, with whom she and her mother lived for so many years. But in 1929, George moved to Flo’s, and Ada too left when she married Edward McCarthy, a loader for the London and North Eastern Railway working out of the Farringdon Street Goods Station.
Guinness Buildings, Walworth, where Jennie and Ada lived in separate blocks for many years. Photo courtesy of Guinness Trust.
Mother and daughter remained in close proximity, though, living in different blocks of the Guinness Buildings on Brandon Street in Walworth, tenement housing erected for the urban poor that consisted of spare, two room flats with no running water or electricity, a shared toilet and sink on the landing, and pay access to bathing facilities two days of the week. They resided separately at Guinness Buildings until Jennie moved in 1954 to Eastbourne, where Nellie Jane, her husband Reginald, and the widowed Alice lived.
This might have been the end of the story, minus the unknowable details, but for a random search I did on the British Newspaper Archive website, completely apart from my Vanson research. I forget the exact parameters I searched on, but a March, 1934 headline I came across was provocative and sensationalist: “Girl Enveloped in Flames from Head to Feet. Young Hotel Servant’s Terrible End After Clothes Caught Fire.” The article appeared on the front page of the Eastbourne Gazette, and told of a young woman employed by the South Cliff Hotel in Eastbourne as a live-in chambermaid and waitress. Just off duty, the girl had been alone in her bedroom making notes in the laundry logbook when the skirt of her uniform caught fire on the gas flame of room’s heater. She was immediately engulfed in flames, and ran screaming into the nearby hotel kitchen where a porter had the presence of mind to fetch an eiderdown quilt and smother the flames. Her clothing was burnt completely away, and the porter, with the help of other staff who’d come running, laid her on her bed and covered her with blankets. She was admitted to the Princess Alice Hospital “suffering from extensive burns on her arms, legs, abdomen, chest and all over her back up to her neck,” and died the next day “due to shock following severe burning.” The inquest reported that there’d been no guard on the gas fireplace, but acknowledged that “most of us do use [gas fires] in this way.” The hotel was never considered to be culpable, although the Coroner made a point of saying that guards could be had “at very little extra cost, and they are well worth it, because they are just the thing to prevent clothes from igniting.” It was a sad tale indeed, but most interesting for me was that the young chambermaid’s name was Grace Vanson.
In all my efforts to discover the story of Jennie (Jane) Vanson and her daughters, I’d never come across anyone named Grace, but I was suddenly certain, in the way one can be with a hunch, that this was another of Jennie’s girls. The newspaper articles referring to the tragedy of Grace’s death quoted a sister, Miss Mary Jane Vanson, thanking the South Cliff Hotel’s management and staff “who had done everything that was possible for her sister” and I wondered, might the reporter have gotten it wrong, and Mary Jane was actually Nellie Jane? Elsewhere in the paper was an item of thanks “to all friends for the beautiful floral tributes and letters of sympathy” posted by Mrs. Jane Vanson and family. The Vanson story, I felt sure, had not yet revealed its final chapter.
Grace was 20 years old when she died in March of 1934, which meant she’d been born around 1914. I searched for, and found, an entry in the indexes for a birth registration that fit only too well – a Grace Vanson born in Lambeth in 1913 to a mother with the maiden name of Evans. Our Jennie had been born Jane Evans, but her husband Richard had been dead two years by the time of this Grace’s birth. If Grace was indeed Jennie’s daughter, who was the father? The only way to find out was to send for the birth registration, and when it arrived, it confirmed what I had suspected: Grace’s parents were Jane Vanson “formerly Evans” and her brother-in-law, George Vanson, a “waterside labourer”.
So how had the relationship that produced a daughter come about? Had George been a stalwart presence, supporting Jennie during Richard’s awful illness? Had he been a comfort she couldn’t do without after Richard’s death? Or had she been the one to offer George care in his time of need, when his marriage to Edith fell apart? Or was the real story something less noble, a matter of acting on impulses and giving in to attractions? One thing is certain: George’s wife Edith and their daughter Isabel were alive and living in a house on Inglemere Road in Mitcham, Surrey by 1918, and where they remained until Edith’s death, oddly enough in the same month and year as Grace’s – March, 1934. In contrast to Grace’s demise, fraught with tragedy and pathos, Edith’s, at the ripe age of 84, while surely sad for her unmarried daughter and companion Isabel and her Pitcher offspring, was in comparison, unremarkable and ordinary. Did Isabel send a note to her father at Rowton House, sharing the news of his wife’s death? Did George ever hear about his daughter Grace’s tragic end in the seaside resort town of Eastbourne?
George died of heart failure and a stroke on the 21st of January, 1945. The record states that he was 79, but counting from his birth in 1863 he was actually 82. The record also indicates that George’s regular place of residence was still the tiny cubicle at Rowton House in London, yet his death occurred at an address in Worthing, a coastal town only a few miles from Eastbourne. It’s tempting to think that this means something, that perhaps George was reconciled with Jennie and the remainder of her family in the end, but I’ve found nothing to substantiate the idea, and in 1945 Jennie still lived in London at Guinness Buildings. Sometime in 1954, she left London and moved in with Nellie Jane and her husband, sharing their tidy two storey rowhouse just a few blocks from the seafront. It must have seemed like a different world to her. Instead of the traffic and people noises she’d heard all her life, she’d have heard the cry of gulls and the crash of the surf. In place of the familiar smells of vehicle exhaust and sewers and other people’s cooking were the odours of fish and tangy salt water. On warm days she and Nellie Jane and Alice might have strolled the beachfront promenade, or walked out on the pier, and turned their faces to the sun. She didn’t live long after her move to Eastbourne, but it’s nice to think of her in that tranquil setting, spending her last days in the company of her daughters. Jennie died on the 19th of March, 1955, and was buried at the Ocklynge Cemetery in Eastbourne.
Sources
Eastbourne Gazette, Wednesday, March 21, 1934
Sunderland Echo and Shipping Gazette, Friday, July 19, 1935
South London Chronicle, January 1, 1898
Rogues and Vagabonds: Vagrant Underworld in Britain 1815-1985, by Lionel Rose, Routledge, Oxon, 1988
If you’ve gone down rabbit holes in search of elusive ancestors and found yourself in a maze-like world of tunnels and loops and switchbacks, you’ll understand the tale I’m about to share. Those of you who’ve read The Cowkeeper’s Wish will know who Jennie (Jane) is: one of the cowkeeper’s granddaughters, married in 1890 to a shoemaker named Richard Vanson, and our great-great aunt. Some of the Vanson story we’ve told in the book, and some in a 
She was immediately engulfed in flames, and ran screaming into the nearby hotel kitchen where a porter had the presence of mind to fetch an eiderdown quilt and smother the flames. Her clothing was burnt completely away, and the porter, with the help of other staff who’d come running, laid her on her bed and covered her with blankets. She was admitted to the Princess Alice Hospital “suffering from extensive burns on her arms, legs, abdomen, chest and all over her back up to her neck,” and died the next day “due to shock following severe burning.” The inquest reported that there’d been no guard on the gas fireplace, but acknowledged that “most of us do use [gas fires] in this way.” The hotel was never considered to be culpable, although the Coroner made a point of saying that guards could be had “at very little extra cost, and they are well worth it, because they are just the thing to prevent clothes from igniting.” It was a sad tale indeed, but most interesting for me was that the young chambermaid’s name was Grace Vanson.
The Cowkeeper's Wish 