Falling through the cracks Part Two the story of Montague Hall

Montague Hall, 1914

Our great grandfather managed to fall through the cracks and after leaving one family, started a second.

He lived with my great grandmother for perhaps eight years and they had five children before they separated. She returned home to the Derby Workhouse where my great aunt was born and he to Gravesend.

What little his children knew of him could be written on a postcard. His daughter remembered she had seen his medals and a uniform, and my grandfather once gave his birthplace as the Transvaal in South Africa where he once served. Little enough.

I doubt that they were even married. No record of such a marriage has turned up and while Eliza described herself as married in 1911 and called herself Hall, she had reverted to her maiden name on the electoral register in 1921. Her death certificate records her as “Eliza Boot otherwise Eliza Hall.”

Nora and his second family

So perhaps my great grandfather felt there was nothing wrong in declaring himself as “Bachelor” when he married Nora Gertrude Kathleen Corke on November 20th 1906. And perhaps it was a genuine mistake that he said he was 37 and not 39.

He went on to have five children with Nora. It would be another 100 years before the descendants of the two families came to know of each other’s existence.

Working independently of each other we began to stumble over the story.

My cousin in Canada was the first to discover Montague’s new life. She was the granddaughter of Laura Hall born in the Derby Workhouse.

Down in Kent another granddaughter was also beginning to uncover the unsettling evidence that Montague had had a previous life. By one of those genetic twists, Montague passed on the same family characteristics.

Montague in the uniform of the West Kents

Hall children have a tendency to be on the short side, can be red headed and some at least have a similar mark on their eye. They showed up in my grandfather, are present in some of my Canadian cousins and are there amongst the Halls in Kent.

In this much Montague was not entirely able to slip away from his first family. And there is just one scrap of official documentation which also tied the two parts of his life together.

In the War Ministry there is a record of his service in the East Yorks which sits beside his military papers from 1914 when he reenlisted with the West Kents.

There is even a photograph of him in uniform sometime between 1914 and his death in 1916.
It was supplied by my cousin Juanita, who until recently had no knowledge of her other family in Derby and along with a picture of Nora they are the only personal link any of us have with Montague.

So by and large for better or for worse Montague did slip through the net, reinventing himself and in the process losing one family and making another.

Picture; Montague Hall in the uniform of the West Kents circa 1914, from the collection of Nita Luce

Falling through the cracks Part One the story of Montague Hall

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.

Montague Nelson was his name and he had been born in Leamington but grew up in Derby, first at Providence Street and later at Sitwell Street. Even in his youth he was no slippers and pipe man. Not for him an armchair in front of the fire after a day at work.

At eighteen he joined the East Yorks and by the time he was 21 had seen service in Gibraltar and the West
Indies as well South Africa.

Sometime after his discharge in 1892 he fell in with Eliza Boot my great grandmother and over the next decade they lived in Bedford, Birmingham and Erith in Kent.

 I suspect theirs was a volatile relationship, and perhaps just burned itself out.

 For after the death of their fourth son and pregnant with her fifth child they parted company. She to the Derby Workhouse where my great aunt was born and he to Gravesend.

Picture, Montague Hall in the uniform of the West Kents circa 1914, in the collection of Andrew Simpson, donated by Nita Luce

Montague Hall, soldier of the Queen, iron driller, and father of ten children

Wynberg in South Africa is a long way from Derby and back in 1888 it must have seemed even further away. Not that my great grandfather had much choice in the matter.

He was a soldier of the Queen and by the time he was 21 had seen service in Gibraltar and the West Indies as well South Africa.

He was one of the thousands of regular soldiers who garrisoned the Empire. It was a life of strict routine, clear discipline and at times sheer boredom. But for a young man who had grown up in Provident Street and later Sitwell Street this was indeed an adventure.

The corners of the Empire he visited were hot, exotic and in the case of South Africa potentially dangerous. Only nine years earlier the British Army had been defeated by a Zulu army at the Battle of Isandlwana while holding off another vastly superior Zulu force at Rorke’s Drift. Within a short while of the Zulu defeat, the British faced a series of military engagements with the Boer settlers which ended in 1881 only to begin again eighteen years later.

By then he had served his seven years and been discharged in the summer of 1892, but was called back to the Colours in January 1900 and would no doubt have been back in South Africa but at 33 he was deemed unfit.
I often wonder what it was that caused him to be rejected in the winter of 1900. He later suffered from chest problems and these may have been in evidence, or it might have been the hard life he had lived since enlisting at the age of 18 in 1885.

During his seven years with the First Battalion of the East Yorkshire Regiment he was hospitalized thirteen times of which eight were for sexually transmitted diseases and had his good conduct pay suspended for a brief spell.

His return to civilian life in Derby was punctuated with at least one drunken brawl with the police and despite living with our great grandmother for ten years he married another woman.

Those ten years saw him and our great grandmother, Eliza crisscross the country from Bedford where they had one child to Birmingham where they had another two and to Kent where they lost a son aged just six months.
Our views of late Victorian marriage are coloured by a prim and proper morality which did not reach every corner of society and certainly did not touch my great grandparents. To all intent and purposes they were married and appeared so on the five birth certificates and one death certificate which were issued between 1896 and 1902. But there is no marriage certificate.

Which may have made it easier for our great grandfather to marry in the November of 1906 in Gravesend in Kent and go on to have another five children.

At the outbreak of the First World War he enlisted in the West Kent Regiment, never went abroad and died in July 1916.
He was and remained an enigma around which family stories have arisen.

Both my Derby family and the family in Kent believed he had served in India. My grandfather gave his own place of birth as Wynberg in South Africa despite the fact that he was actually born in Birmingham and one of Montague’s Kent children always maintained that there was more about his life than they knew.

There remain many corners of his life which are shrouded in mystery. He lived at a time when it was still possible to reinvent yourself with little concern that a paper trail of documents would catch you out. In his case these are sparse enough.

I continue to hope that more will turn up but the passage of time makes this unlikely. Perhaps one day we will visit the military base at Wynberg in the same way that I have seen the drill hall where he signed up in 1914. But in the meantime it will have to be Provident Street.

Earlier stories on great grandfather Montague
http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/falling-through-cracks-part-one-story.html
http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/falling-through-cracks-part-two-story_25.html

Picture; Montague in the uniform of the West Kents, circ 1914-15, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

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