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.