Mary Anne Took lived in the 1840s on Barrack Street, one of the most notorious areas in the naval town of Plymouth. This street was described at the time by the more well-to-do as a “rookery” (defined by George Galloway in 1792 as a “cluster of mean tenements densely populated by people of the lowest class”). It was home to beggars, petty criminals, prostitutes, vermin and disease. How did Mary Anne, a widow with a young daughter, find a way to survive?
Born Mary Anne Bartlett in 1816 in Ermington, a rural parish in Devon, my great great great grandmother hastily married John Took, a farm labourer, in May 1840, when she was three months pregnant. She was left widowed with a baby daughter when John succumbed to consumption in September 1841.
What was she to do then? The widow of a farm labourer with a baby girl, she could have relied on her husband’s family for support, or perhaps for parish relief in her husband’s parish of Exbourne. She could have returned to her own family, or even to Ermington, to rely on relief from the parish where she was born. Instead, she chose to move to Plymouth.
We know this because this is where she married Robert Phippen. Serving in the Royal Marines, Robert returned to Plymouth in May 1847 after six years at sea. He married Mary Anne on January 20th, 1848 and sailed again eight days later. Their marriage certificate lists Mary Anne’s residence as Barrack Street, just outside the Royal Marines Barracks gates, in the district of East Stonehouse.
We have to wonder what brought Mary Anne and her baby daughter to Plymouth after her husband died in 1841, and how she survived once she got there. Plymouth was a rough and tumble sea port and army town, known for its pubs, prostitution and disease. Mary Anne became just one of thousands of single women surviving on piece work and charity. If she was like the majority of these single women, she drifted into prostitution whenever a ship returned to port from an overseas voyage, or when a new regiment arrived. Most of these women ended up marrying a sailor or soldier, having children and settling down to raise their families. Some turned again to prostitution when their husbands were sent overseas, not out of choice, but because they had no other means of supporting their children.
Although the city’s middle classes righteously condemned prostitution, the people in Mary Anne’s neighbourhood passed no judgement on the “loose” women on Barrack Street. Her neighbours had their own struggles, and they also did whatever they had to do to survive.
At the time of the 1851 census (after Mary Anne had moved away), 397 people lived in the 26 houses on Barrack Street. The most crowded house, Number 4, was home to 39 people in 13 families. The heads of these families included three charwomen, two soldiers, a pensioner, two seamstresses, a dressmaker, a tailor, a shipwright and a shoe maker.
Thirty three people in ten families lived at Number 10, even though the main floor was taken up by a beer parlour. The residents included 23-year-old Jane Pedrick, a very enterprising lodging-house keeper whose three lodgers were all single women, one a dress maker, another a seamstress, and the last a laundress. In another room lived an older woman, the wife of a marine away at sea. She had four visitors on the night of the census. One was a 23-year-old unmarried girl, the other three all young unmarried men – two marines and a sailor.
The street was home to some 30 marines and their families, and 16 retired soldiers. Other people were working as masons, carpenters, shoe makers, errand boys and in a dozen other occupations. Businesses were established on the main floors of more than half the houses on the street, including two shops, three bakeries and a total of ten beer houses, probably all catering to the marines in the barracks at the end of the road.
Robert was at sea in 1849, and Mary Ann was alone in Plymouth with her daughter, when cholera swept through the city. It disproportionately attacked the poorest, most crowded neighbourhoods, killing 1,600 people – almost two percent of the population of the city. The epidemic arrived on an immigrant ship that docked in February. It reached its peak in the second week of August, when the disease took 127 lives.
It was no wonder that the epidemic struck Plymouth so hard. The city had some of the worst overcrowding in the country. The cholera spread through neighbourhoods like Barrack Street in hours, leaving a swath of the dead in its path.
Reverend George Prynne, newly arrived in the city, wrote about it afterwards: “For three months we seemed to be living amongst the dying and the dead. A large wooden hospital for the whole of Plymouth was erected in our parish. We set up an altar in the largest ward, in order that everything might always be ready for communicating the dying. As the visitation reached its climax the deaths became very frequent and rapid. I was walking out one morning about nine o'clock. I met a woman hurrying along, and in answer to my enquiry she said she was going to fetch the doctor for her husband who had been seized with cholera. In the evening both she and her husband were in their coffins; the woman had died first!”
Robert spent seven of his first eight years of marriage at sea. He had occasional shore leave, and it was the result of a short visit home that he and Mary Anne had a baby. Emma Elizabeth Phippen was born on October 11th, 1850, in a room the couple had rented at 57 George Street, a quarter mile from the barracks.
It’s hard to imagine how Mary Anne made it through the first years she was alone. Robert was only being paid a little over a shilling a day and much of this was held back for his rations and uniform, so very little of his money made it back to her. Robert didn’t have his regiment’s permission to marry – such permission was given to only four in a hundred private soldiers – so Mary Anne wasn’t permitted to live in barracks while Robert was at sea. She needed at least three shillings a week just to pay for a single room in the poorer areas of Plymouth. She had two girls to feed and clothe. She was illiterate and had no trade to fall back on.
The War Department expected soldiers’ wives to turn to the parish for relief. This meant going into the workhouse, or, if the parish was generous, receiving a few shillings to continue living at home. Plymouth was notorious for its parsimonious attitude, doing everything within its power, including trying to send families back to the parishes where the women were born, to avoid accepting responsibility for them. At one point the Plymouth Authority simply refused to pay poor relief to soldiers’ wives at all.
Emma was just 21 months old in July 1852 when Robert embarked on HMS Queen for a tour of duty in the Mediterranean. He was gone for more than four years, including a year and a half in the Black Sea, fighting in the Crimean War.
The Black Sea is reached from the Mediterranean by sailing through the Bosporus, a narrow channel of water that divides Turkey into its European and Asian halves. The Crimea is a peninsula that reaches into the Black Sea from the Ukraine. This was Russian territory in 1854, when the war broke out.
The war was a successful attempt by Britain and France to halt Russia’s expansion into the Balkans. They allied with Turkey, which in those days controlled much more of the Balkans than it does today. An attack by the Russians on the Turkish Black Sea fleet gave the British and French the justification they had been waiting for, and they declared war.
This was the first “modern” war, characterised by combined arms operations, new weapons technology, and trench warfare. It set the pattern for the US Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and the Great War of 1914. The Crimean War was also fought at the dawn of modern medicine: new theories of hygiene, surgery and post operative care were all tested in the field. It was a modern war in another way too: two-thirds of the English population was now literate, widely reading the newspapers that vied to be the first to report on events in the Black Sea. The first war correspondents, steamships, telegraph lines and primitive photography all meant a steady stream of timely news eagerly read by a hungry audience ready to analyze every decision taken by the government and its generals.
Editors looking for new angles soon took up the cause of the women left behind. The plight of army wives sparked the compassion of the public. Benefiting from a wave of charitable donations, the newly created Central Association in Aid of the Wives and Families of Soldiers Ordered on Active Service supported 6,700 families with weekly allowances, clothing, bedding and medical aid. Responding to this wave of popular concern, the War Office implemented a new 6d per day field allowance, encouraging soldiers to remit all of this back to their families. With the Association’s support and the proceeds of the field allowance, Mary Anne might barely have had the money she needed to survive.
Robert finally returned to Plymouth in August 1856. He never went to sea again, spending the last years of his military career at the marine barracks in East Stonechurch, before receiving his discharge on March 4th, 1864 after 22 years of military service. He and Mary Anne retired to the town of Buckfastleigh, the home of Mary Anne’s father’s family.
Robert and Mary Anne lived well into old age. Robert passed away in 1901, Mary Anne in 1909, at the age of 93. Whatever the circumstances of the first half of her life, they seem to have done her no harm.
