Edwin Norman Harland, born in Sidcup and emigrated to Canada and the case of Dr Crippen

The young Edwin

Now, I always find it a privilege when friends take the time to write for the blog and so I was especially pleased when Jean added another chapter in the story of her family.

Unlike my uncle, Harold Morris the milkman, whose whole life was, spent living a stone's throw away from the house in Welling where he was born; his uncle was to live out his life
in Canada, thousands of miles away.*

Edwin Norman Harland (a younger brother of Maud, Harold's mother) was born in Sidcup in 1882.

His great-grandfather, William Harland, had been a brickmaker working in places such as Loampit Hill, Lewisham, and Whitewall Creek, near Rochester, where he was to die in 1832 as one of England's first victims of cholera- leaving a widow and several young children to be cared for by his eldest son, also a brickmaker.

Making bricks circa 1870

One of these children, aged eight at the time of his father's death, was Richard Harland.

He struggled to make good and in time became a Master Brickmaker, founding his Camden Brickworks on Whitehorse Hill, Chislehurst, in the 1860s.

Edwin was named after his uncle, Edwin Harland, whose own brickworks (Harland Brothers) were in Sidcup, where Harland Avenue is today and where young Edwin's father, George, had worked until his early death at the age of 35.

Young Edwin had undoubtedly inherited his dark, good looks from his grandmother: Eleanor Cooper, Mrs Page.

Maud

Unusually for a Harland, Edwin was destined not to become a brickmaker.

It is not known when he chose to follow this different path, but by 1901, when aged 17, he had become a Railway Booking Clerk in Mottingham, close to Eltham where his widowed mother, Annie Page, had opened a baker's shop in what today is known as Footscray Road.

At the same time, 1901, a young Devon girl -Maud Mary Westcott- was working as a general servant to the Read family at No. 73 West Chislehurst Park, Eltham.

By now, Edwin was using not his first name but his second: Norman.

“Norman” and Maud were to marry in January 1905.  He was 22 and she was 24.

They were to have two sons: Lloyd George (born in 1906) and Ronald Norman (born in 1907).

Maud and Edwin, 1905

It would seem that by 1910 they may well have been having dreams of a better life for their sons, perhaps in Canada, with a land grant that would enable Norman to become a farmer working his own land.

In July 1910, another couple had plans for a new life in Canada.

They were an American physician Hawley Crippen and his lover, Ethel La Neve, who fled England after the circumstances of Dr Crippen's wife's death in London, gave cause for questioning.

Hawley and Ethel embarked for Canada at Antwerp, sailing on the SS Montrose; but they were recognised on board and, by means of the Montrose's wireless apparatus, the police were alerted and the couple arrested upon arrival.

This was the first time that Marconi’s wireless technology had been utilised at sea in this way, the couple's arrest making history. The value of wireless for life-saving purposes became so great that soon British ships of large size and carrying passengers were being equipped with the apparatus; and it was the summoning of vessels to the sinking Titanic in 1912 that brought home to the world the importance of wireless communication.

By 1914 nearly a thousand British merchant ships were using wireless. It was in that year that the Montrose was wrecked on the Goodwin Sands. With the outbreak of war, she had been sold to the Admiralty for use as a blockship at Dover, but she broke loose from her moorings during a gale, drifted out to sea and was lost.

By 1911, a year after Dr Crippen and his lover had fled from Antwerp in the Montrose,  Norman and Maud, with their two young sons (Lloyd aged 5 and Ronald aged 3) had made up their minds to seek a new life in Canada.  Joining the Montrose at Liverpool, they arrived safely at New Brunswick on 27 March.

The ship's log records show that their destination was Winnipeg, and that Norman's intention was to be a farm labourer.   Ten years later, Norman and his family were living in the municipality of North Star, in the district of North Battleford, Saskatchewan.

In Canada

Now aged 39, Norman's occupation was given as Farmer.  His two sons, Lloyd and Ronald, were now aged 15 and 13.

What happened next is best left to Carol, Norman's great-granddaughter....

Story © Jean Gammons

Pictures; from the collection of Carol Spencer, Edwin's great granddaughter













* The Harland Family, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20Harland%20Family