Of dark secrets and half revealed family lives

My great grandmother’s life was not unusual.

But it is that very ordinariness which makes her story remarkable and unlocks something of the history of the late 19th and 20th centuries.

She was born in 1872 in Whiteman’s Yard,* gave birth to five children the last of which was born in the Derby Workhouse, travelled across the country with her partner who she never married, and  returned to Derby in the winter of 1902 with three young boys.

My great grandfather remained in Kent and in the fullness of time married and had five more children.

Eliza Boot appears in eleven official documents and is mentioned in two letters, and one newspaper account.  Her partner and my great grandfather was Montague Hall, who served his Queen in the East York’s, saw service in the West Indies, Gibraltar and South Africa.

It is I guess fairly typical of many people’s lives at the time and not for the first led me to reflect that their lives were little ones lived out in a big century.

Many of us will be able track relatives touched by the workhouse and many will also have family members who spent part of their time in some far away part of the old empire or toiled in factory, mill or engineering works.

Theirs was a tempestuous relationship, and one which saw them move around the country.  In 1894 they were in Bedford, two years later in Birmingham and finally by 1902 in Kent.

There may have been more towns, and cities but the documentary evidence is not there to furnish the trail.

Despite all this travelling Eliza’s time before she left Derby and after she returned was centred on a few small streets all with a few minutes of each other.

Her part of Derby was a densely packed mix of small terraced housing, timber yards, silk, and lace and hosiery mills bounded on the east by the railway and to the north by the river.

They came from the families that helped make Derby.  Montague’s father worked on the railways as did hers, while her mother, aunt and cousins worked in the silk mills and she and her sister were in service.

Montague was an iron driller and would have found ready work in the foundries around the town, and it was this trade which took them across the country finally ending up as “machinist in a gun factory” in Gravesend.

And like so many lives of the period theirs are ones that all too often are obscured by a lack of family detail.  So where they lived between 1896 and 1902 are fixed by the birth certificates of their children and one census entry.

True, we do have his military records from 1888-1892, but the next years are almost a blank and those of Eliza’s from 1902 till her death in 1963 are sketchy and at the mercy of a few documents and some street memories.

But some glimpses shine through the murk like the newspaper report from the Derby Mercury dated Wednesday May 2 1894.

Not unlike today the journalist had been sent down to the local magistrate’s courts to rake over and represent to an eager public the doings of the less respectable.

And there under the torturous heading “Rough experiences of lovers” are Eliza and Montague.  She of 9 Chapel Place and him of Sitwell Street.  They had been charged with “being drunk and disorderly in Chapel Place, Canal Street, shortly before twelve o’clock on Friday night.”  To add to the family shame both were further charged with attacking a policeman and resisting arrest.

From the distance of over 100 years it is easy to smile at the skeleton in the cupboard, but here I think there is more.

There are plenty of accounts of drunken behaviour and confrontations with the police in our inner cities and towns during this period which is not surprising given the number of places selling alcohol.

My own memories of my part of London were of pubs almost on every street corner, and on Canal Street in Derby there were three beer shops and two pubs on a not very long road which consisted of just 24 properties and two factories.

So there was plenty of opportunities and in the light of the severity of the punishment an indication that the authorities treated drink related crimes seriously.  Great grandmother was fined “5s and costs or seven days [imprisonment] for the drunkenness, and 20s and costs or 14 days for the assault,” while great grandfather received a fine of “40s and costs, or a month [in prison]”.  Neither fine was a small amount and would have represented a big chunk of their weekly earnings.

I would like to think this was a one off, but his army records and her subsequent life suggest that this may not have been so, added to which there is anecdotal evidence from Montague’s other family that “he liked a drink.”

This is vague and all together very subjective but hints at something.
And it is that other family which has over time come to intrigue me, not because of any animosity but more because of the way that Montague could just settle down with another partner and have five more children.

Now I would venture that it is today very difficult just to disappear and create a new identity. Not impossible I grant you but for most of us without limitless amounts of money and professional help no easy task.

But go back to the year Queen Victoria died and anything was possible.

In 1901 no one as yet had a National Insurance number, there was no sophisticated electronic surveillance technology to track your last supermarket purchase, or the route you took home, or even who you last spoke to. It was therefore entirely possible to quietly leave your family, friends, workmates and arrive somewhere else with a new name and fresh history. I guess the wonder is that more people didn’t do it.

My great grandfather did. Or at least in his case so confident was he that he would evade detection, he continued with his own name, but reinvented his birth year and conveniently failed to reveal to his bride that he had fathered four boys and a daughter with my great grandmother.

So a story of two unremarkable lives but ones which present fascinating insights into a time long gone.

*http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/living-in-whitemans-yard.html

Pictures; Whiteman’s Yard, Montague Hall circa 1914, Union Street, The Derby Mercury, May 1894, Montague's other family, Nora his wife, Jeff, Bessie and Beryl