Friction between the Sanderson women of Bethnal Green

As the title of this blog says, the family to which we belong—the descendants of Dave and Sandy Ritchie—is very small. In the words of my mother and aunt, this is because both of their parents were only children. Or so they believed. New information turned up in the course of my research which suggested that my grandmother had a stepsister from her father's first marriage.

I wrote previously about this person, Caroline Emma Sanderson, but wanted to confirm my findings. So I hired a professional genealogist, Janice Heppenstall from English Ancestors, to go through the facts I had gathered and expand on them.

Janice confirmed that my great-grandfather Charles Sanderson, born in 1857 in York, married his first wife Emma Elsey in 1879. The couple lived in Roundhay, Leeds, and welcomed Caroline into the world in 1880. Janice pointed out that they had been very clever in naming the child. Not only was she named after her mother but she was named after her father too; "Caroline" is the adjective used to relate to Charles I and Charles II in the United Kingdom, meaning  "of or relating to Charles". This fascinating piece of trivia seems to  signal a strong sense of relationship and pride within the family.

I also learnt that Charles' wife Emma died in 1900 in Surrey. This was new information because, although I knew about Charles and Caroline appearing on the  1901 census for Bethnal Green, I had assumed that they moved to London after Emma's death. Evidently, they had moved south sometime in the decade between the censuses. On reflection, this made sense. Emma's parents lived in Surrey, and it would have been natural for them to want to have their granddaughter closer to them. The move would have made sense from an economic point of view too, because there was surely good work to be had for an experienced coachman in the capital.

Caroline was 20 at the time her mother died. She stated her occupation as "Household duties" in the census the following  year. It must have been frustrating for her, the daughter of a well-travelled military man, to stay at home and care for her grieving father. It was doubtless a huge relief when Charles met and married my great-grandmother Florence Wilson in 1903.

But now there were two women in the house. Caroline, aged 23, and Florence, aged 28, could not have found it easy. Caroline, who had been raised as an only child, was likely accustomed to being in charge, whereas Florence, who was the third of seven children, was probably used to choosing the path of least resistance.

As the two women were attempting to work out their differences, big changes were happening in the city. The District Railway and Circle Line began converting their passenger operations from steam to electric power. Aldwych was being redeveloped and buildings were being removed to make way for the new, much wider Kingsway. As time went by, the Bakerloo Line was opened, as was The Ritz Hotel in Piccadilly, and the stage play Peter Pan or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up premiered at the Duke of York's Theatre. In Manchester,   the Women's' Social and Political Movement, under the  direction of Emmeline Pankhurst was getting off the ground, later to be known as the Suffragettes. Meanwhile, further afield, the 1904 Summer Olympics took place in St Louis, Missouri; Theodore Roosevelt was  elected as President of the United States; Russian workers began protesting against Tsar Nicolas II's rule in St Petersburg; Albert Einstein completed his scientific paper on the quantum theory of light; and the Cairo-Cape Town Railway was officially inaugurated.

It is possible that none of this meant much to Caroline, though. She had fallen in love with a career soldier named Frederick Sanderson and was preparing to tie the knot. Their marriage took place at the St Pancras Register Office in May 1905, just four months after the birth of my grandmother Sandy. I can picture the wife-to-be leaving her stepmother's home with hardly a backward glance. Charles' new baby was 24 years younger than Caroline, and the doting parents probably got on her nerves. Besides, baby Florence was more like a niece than  a member of her own generation.

As for my great-grandmother Florence, I imagine she felt a weight lift off her shoulders as she turned back into the house and anticipated finally being the mistress of her own domain.

Photo credit: Suffrage Caravan Tours, Bridlington, 1908 by LCE LibraryLSE Library.

 

Gertie the Gaiety Girl

A curious piece of family lore was brought to mind when I listened to a podcast episode about researching theatre ancestors. It was that "Gertie was a gaiety girl". Gaiety girl? My im

agination offered up images of sexy dancers but I doubted such women would get a mention at the box office. Plus, we had more than one Gertie in our family tree. Still, the podcast encouraged me to go searching, and the exercise proved very illuminating.

The fact that my mother  and aunt knew about Gertie's career in theatre pointed to her being the more recent Gertrude in the family tree. That would be Gertrude Parker, elder sister of Maude Parker. In other words, this was my Grandad's aunt on his mother's side.  She was born in 1871 in Marylebone and appeared on the 1891 census aged 20 and working as a parlour maid/domestic servant.

According to the podcast, it was typical for theatre people to have two jobs. Because of the inconsistency of stage work, they generally had a regular day job as well. In the case of Gaiety girls, working at the Gaiety Theatre in London's West End, their night job involved singing and dancing as members of the chorus in musical comedies. It was glamorous too, by the sounds of it, because London's top couturiers of the 1890s  designed fashionable bathing suits and clothes for the girls to wear on stage, knowing that their appearance in the theatre and in illustrated periodicals would serve as excellent publicity for their latest fashion lines.

The Gaiety Theatre was situated on Aldwych, at the eastern end of the Strand in Westminster. It had seating for 2000 people on four levels. Interestingly, the proprietor chose to ban smoking and drinking from the main theatre, instead providing separate saloons for these activities. Lighting was  achieved with a novel gaslighting system which created an appealing ambiance. The music was live and the script was witty, but manager George Edwardes was careful to steer clear of the racier elements of burlesque in order to please a slightly more refined audience.

The gaiety girls themselves were respectable young women, polite and well-mannered, according to Wikipedia. They drew people to the theatre and the surrounding restaurants and were regarded as suitable dates for bright young men. The term "stage door Johnnies" comes from the wealthy gentlemen who stood waiting for the chorus girls to emerge from the theatre after the show so they could take them out to dinner.

According to author Alan Hyman, who wrote the book The Gaiety Years, many unlikely matches occurred as a result of this practice. "At the old Gaiety in the Strand the chorus was becoming a matrimonial agency for girls with ambitions to marry into the peerage." After  the star Connie Gilchrist married  the 7th Earl of Orkney,, several other show girls abandoned George Edwards to marry noblemen, bankers or stockbrokers. "The Guv’nor finding this was playing ducks and drakes with his theatrical plans had a 'nuptial clause' inserted in every contract. ... Debutantes were competing with the other girls to get into the Gaiety chorus while upper-class youths were joining the ranks of the chorus boys."

Our Gaiety girl, Gertrude, married Harry Milner Willis, an accountant. The marriage took place   in 1892,  before George Edwards rose to the height of his career with shows that went to Broadway. Nevertheless, she may have participated in earlier productions, such as Faust up to Date [1888], Carmen up to Data [1890], and Cinder Ellen up too Late [1891].

Investigating the link between Gertie and the theatre taught me a lot about Edwardian musical comedy and London society in the 1890s. It also explained something about a family heirloom. I had inherited from my mother an autograph book full of signatures from actors and actresses. My aunt had been unable to remember how  it had come to be in the family, so my sister and I had assumed that Grandad, being so well-travelled, must have also collected autographs as a hobby. Now I believe it was Auntie Gertie who gathered the signatures because it was her that mixed in theatre circles, rubbing shoulders with the stars of the day and many minor characters who would go on to build illustrious careers.

 Photo credit: Miss Broughton in swing, by The National Archives UK.

You never know the ways in which genealogical research will enrich your life

A photograph of our grandfather turned up in December last year— stirring some excitement. Despite my intention to write about it immediately, though, I got involved with other things and let it wait. Then, when my husband and I travelled to England recently to visit our daughter Tammy, I expected to do some genealogical research on the ground, but it happened to be during the heatwave in July. Not a good time for driving from one county to another and pouring over microfiche machines to locate copies of original documents!

Luckily, there is no pressure to update the blog or track down records. The records I would have been looking for had nothing to do with my application for UK citizenship. I'm happy to say that good progress has been made in that regard. All the effort I have put in over the years to source evidence of our English roots has at last paid off.

I will never regret the fact that the process of proving that Grandad was born in England took so long because it got me started on this family history journey. It is a journey I wouldn't previously have attempted but it has yielded enormous pleasure. Travel has taken on new meaning since I began taking note of where my ancestors came from. Whereas places like York and Ipswich never meant anything to me before, their names now ring with significance as I recall what I have unearthed about my great-great-grandparents on my mother's side. My taste in reading, too, has changed; I never used to be much interested in historical fiction but now I relish the chance to read about characters living in England during the 1800s and early 1900s, especially when authors have taken the trouble to research the socio-economic conditions of the day and describe the landscape in a way that conjures up its very smells and sounds.

The photo in this blog post depicts Grandad with his mother Maude. I know this because of the names scribbled on the back in pencil, but I'm not entirely sure who scribbled the names and whether they are even correct. All I know is that the photograph was in a tiny silver frame from my mother's collection of tiny framed family photographs. Mom, it must be said, was known to have put artificial flowers in pots and collected pictures of strangers to achieve a cottage look in her home, so nothing is guaranteed. Yet there seems to be a resemblance between the woman in this photograph and the other pictures we have of Maude, and the little boy in the sailor outfit could very easily be David, aged somewhere around four years old. If that is the case, the picture dates back to about 1906.

As I write this, I realise how far behind I have fallen in recording what I have learnt in the past few months. Hopefully, I will find time to remedy that soon. If anyone has found this blog interesting and can contribute any information to my ancestor search, please do get in touch.

Evidence of a good start in life

The search for evidence of Grandad's early life continues, but recently I made a couple of discoveries which I will write about in two separate blog posts. This post is about a medal I found, and the following one will be about a previously-forgotten photograph.

The story begins with my daughter Tammy coming out from England in September and asking to look for the ring my mother left her. Putting aside an afternoon at the end of her visit, we took out all the boxes I had stored containing my parents' special items. Tammy found the ring and a couple of gold wristwatches, well-worn but still very pretty, which I put aside to have checked by our jeweller. Then we proceeded to look through the other trinkets in the box to see what else was there. The last time we had gone through the trinkets was when we had been sorting my mother's possessions after she died, and that was eleven years ago.

Tammy came across what looked like a very old metal shield. It was difficult to read the inscription on it but she eventually succeeded. It said: "King's Medal, Awarded by the London County Council for punctual attendance, 1910-1911". The name "David Scott Ritchie" was also inscribed on the reverse of the medal, although it was extremely faint.

This was an Amazing find, since we have no other artefacts relating to Grandad's schooldays. In 1910 he would have been eight years old! The medal had been presented to him in his second or third year of school, and the fact that he attended regularly said a lot about his stable life at the time.

Tammy looked up the provenance of school attendance medals and learnt that they had been manufactured in several versions. Originally, they bore the name and face of Queen Victoria, then King Edward VII, then King George V. Grandad's King's Medal showed King George V on its face. It was presented by the London County Council to all children who attended school regularly, but only children with a 100% attendance record for the school year and whose behaviour was considered commendable by the headmaster qualified to receive it.

Apparently, the medal came with an orange ribbon but Grandad's medal had lost that, no doubt due to rough handling over the 110 years since it was awarded! I like to think of Grandad being proud of his achievement and of him holding onto the trinket as a reminder of his early years at school.

I took the medal, along with Mom's two gold wristwatches, to our jeweller for cleaning. Imagining that the King's Medal would come up shiny and new-looking, I was disappointed when I was told it couldn't be polished. Apparently, the metal they used was ordinary tin, or something like it, so any attempt to polish it would probably damage it. Later, when Tammy visited again, she  looked at the object I had taken to the jeweller and pronounced my mistake; I had taken an ordinary belt buckle, so it was no wonder the jeweller was confused about my claim that it was a family heirloom. Fortunately, there was no need for us to search in the boxes for the actual King's Medal because Tammy had images of it on her phone from when we had shared the discovery with my aunt and cousins. Maybe I could still get it polished, but the images are fine for now!

While the discovery of a school attendance medal cannot replace a birth certificate as proof that Grandad was born in England, it certainly adds something to the story. We know from the 1911 census that Grandad was at the home of his aunt and uncle, Emily and William Smith, on the night the census was taken. From what I have found out about his parents [see other posts about his father, David Scott Ritchie Sr and his mother, Maude], I feel certain that he was living with the Smiths permanently. From what I have learned about the Smith children and grandchildren, it appears that Emily and William placed a high value on education. So then, while the medal awarded to the nine-year-old David doesn't tell us how he became an engineer, it does satisfy my curiosity about how he avoided the long-term effects of having a mentally-ill father and a mother who worked as a cook in residence for aristocratic families. Thanks to the Smiths of St Johns Wood, my grandmother Sandy, mother Wendy, aunt Gillian and all their descendants benefitted from a stable home life, optimism about the future, and a sense of responsibility that translated itself into a sound work ethic and professional success.

Photo: Grandad's medal for good attendance at school..