We're all living longer . . . aren't we?

Mary Phippen slipped gently from life in 1909 at the age of 92. Born in 1816, just a few months after the Battle of Waterloo, she grew up by candle-light, never went to school and never knew a childhood without work. She went on to celebrate the coronation of Queen Victoria, wave goodbye to her husband Robert as he sailed to war in a three-decker sailing ship, marvel at the arrival of railways, photography, electricity and the first motor cars, and, through the dimming perceptions of creeping senility, greet the dawn of aviation.

My great great grandmother wasn’t alone in her longevity. Her father Richard Bartlett died of “natural decay” at 82 and her mother lived to be 87. Mary’s husband Robert Phippen died at 82, his parents died at 84 and 85, and his grandparents died at 79 and 85. Three quarters of my ancestors born in the 1700s and 1800s lived into their sixties and beyond, two-thirds lived past 70, and a quarter lived into their 80s.

How can that be? Aren’t we today living longer and healthier than at any time in the past? Aren’t we the beneficiaries of all the gifts of modern medical science?

Perhaps not.

The biggest change in our lives over the last 150 years has been the eradication of infant mortality. This isn’t the result of modern medical miracles, but is instead the outcome of enlightened public health policy that addresses issues as basic as access to clean drinking water and decent plumbing.

Clapham in 1808

Let’s begin by looking at just one year in the village of Clapham, a relatively well-to-do suburb of London on the south bank of the Thames in Surrey. The burial register for Clapham’s parish church (one of three churches in the village) provides a window on life (and death) 200 years ago (images of pages from the register are on line at ancestry.co.uk if you want to look for yourself).

One hundred and fourteen burials were recorded in the parish register in 1808. The youngest was Mary Thorowgood Keable, the daughter of a pastry cook, who was baptised immediately after she was born and died after just 24 hours. The oldest was Mary Clark, “a Spinster aged 90 years or more, from the Workhouse.”

Some of the more noteworthy burials included 26-year-old William Baker, who died accidentally “carrying a sack of coals for a wager;” 52-year-old William Westbrook, who “put an end to his existence in a fit of insanity;” and the man who was found “drowned in the right Honourable Lord Teignmouth’s pond, name unknown.”

The biggest cause of death was “Consumption,” known today as tuberculosis or TB, which struck a third of the working age men and women who died that year.

This parish register is sad reading, but saddest of all is the story of Clapham’s children.

More than half the burials recorded in 1808 were children under the age of ten. A third were under the age of two.

That year a severe epidemic of measles swept through London. In Clapham it took eleven babies and children. Six others died of convulsions. Three died of causes unknown.

Richard Prescott, aged 11 months, died of Whooping Cough. Jemima Cicely Williams, aged two years, died of “water on the brain.” Maria Daniels, aged four months, was taken by a “Complaint in the bowels.” John Blakely, aged five, died of “inflamation on the lungs.” And the list goes on.

Death was no respecter of class: Thomas Looker succumbed to whooping cough in the Poor House in January, aged one year nine months; Lea Guillebaud, son of the Reverend Peter Guillebaud and his wife Eliza Ann, was taken a few weeks later, aged 11 months,succumbing, bizarrely, to “cutting teeth.”

We’re led to believe that families were big 200 years ago, but perhaps families weren’t as big as we think. While it’s true that women gave birth to many children, this may only have ensured a decent chance that a few of their offspring would survive to become adults. I struggle to imagine the perpetual pall of mourning hanging over Clapham, with every household grieving the loss of so many young souls.

High infant mortality explains why the average age at death in Clapham in 1808 was just 28. People who survived past the age of ten could expect to die at an average age of 50. A third of them would live long enough to qualify as old age pensioners, except that there were no old age pensions in 1808.

It’s easy to believe that the story of our growing average life expectancy is one of great medical breakthroughs by pioneering researchers. That’s part of it of course, but a much smaller part than many of us believe. The biggest results have come from the more mundane focus on public health: clean drinking water, better sanitation and less crowded living conditions.

Life in Victorian London

Two hundred years ago most people shared communal public toilets, or privies, from which waste would be dumped into cesspits or street gutters or in London would flow through sewers directly into the River Thames. Drinking water was usually drawn from wells contaminated by seepage from the privies and cesspits and in London drinking water was drawn untreated directly from the river. Only the wealthy could afford to wash regularly, or to dress in clean clothes. It was common for clothes and hair to be infected with lice.

The vast majority of the population in London and other cities and towns lived in crowded tenements, whole families packed into tiny flea, roach and rodent-infected rooms with communal kitchens, where kitchens existed at all.

Henry Mayhew was a crusading journalist who wrote in the mid-19th century about the lives of the poor in London. He wrote of the lodging houses that catered to the poorest of London “with rooms so crammed with sleepers - [someone he interviewed] believed there were 30 where 12 would have been a proper number - that their breaths in the dead of night and in the unventilated chamber, rose . . . ‘in one foul, choking steam of stench’.” Here someone would scrape together “a handful of bugs” from the bedclothes and crush them under a candlestick. According to Mayhew it was common to get drunk each evening just so that it would be possible to sleep a full night through the stench and the bugs.

He wrote of a street were there were “dead decaying cats and fish, with offal, straw, and refuse scattered over the surface; at one end an entrance to a private yard was used as a urinal; in every part there were most offensive smell.” He described another area that had an “abundance of ordinary filth arising from the exposure of refuse, the surface of the court contained heaps of human excrement, there being only one privy to the whole court, and that not in a state to be publicly used . . .”

He described a creek that had become nothing more than an open sewer, draining directly into the Thames: “. . . the open doorless privies that hung over the water-side, and the dark streaks of filth down the walls, where the drains from each house discharged themselves into the ditch, were proofs indisputable as to how the pollution of the ditch occurred . . . In [the water] floated large masses of rotting weed, and against the posts of the bridges were swollen carcasses of dead animals, ready to burst with the gases of putrefaction. Along its shores were heaps of indescribable filth . . .”

On one street Mayhew came across the home of a barber. “. . . When the scarlet fever was raging in the neighbourhood, the barber who was living here suffered fearfully from it, and no sooner did the man get well of this than he was seized with typhus, and scarcely had he recovered from the first attack of that, than he was struck down a second time with the same terrible disease. Since then he has lost his child from cholera, and at this moment his wife is in the workhouse suffering from the same affliction. The only wonder was that they are not all dead; for as the barber sat at his meals in his small shop, if he put his hand against the wall behind him, it would be covered with the soil of his neighbour’s privy, sopping through the wall.”

Is it any wonder that people died in London at an early age? These living conditions were ideal for any number of infectious diseases, including smallpox, tuberculosis, scarlet fever, whooping cough, diphtheria, dysentery, cholera and measles. Their victims, especially infants and children, were already sickly and malnourished, ready to be taken.

And taken they were. England in 1841 had a population of about 16 million. Between 1838 and 1848 some 160,000 deaths were attributed to typhus. Measles and whooping cough claimed 50,000 between 1838 and 1840. Cholera took 52,000 in 1832, another 50,000 in 1848 and 36,000 in 1853 and 1854. 1848 was an especially bad year: the country was ravaged not only by typhus and cholera, but also by dysentery and influenza which alone took another 13,000. The number of deaths caused by consumption was horrific - perhaps up to a quarter of all deaths in England in the 1840s.

Smallpox and Public Health Policy

Of all these diseases, smallpox was perhaps the most widespread and most dreaded. It was also the first to be conquered.

It’s likely that every person living in England in the 1700s was exposed to smallpox at some point in his or her life and it was the cause of death for one in five. Passed from a victim’s respiratory tract, the smallpox virus was transmitted to others through a victim’s clothing, through corpses and through the air, often wafting through every lane and alley in whole villages and neighbourhoods.

After a 12-day incubation period, patients first noticed a high temperature, headaches and sometimes vomiting. Then a rash would appear, first on the face and then on the rest of the body. The rash would turn into pustules which gave off a stinking odour.

Some victims would pass away peacefully. Others would die in agony, unable to drink or eat, retching blood from their lungs.

Often survivors were left weakened, unable to fend off other diseases. Some were blinded; others found their faces horribly disfigured; and most survivors were scarred for life.

My great, great, great grandfather George Hickford’s second wife Mary passed away in 1839 in Ashen, Essex. The parish register records that she “died of smallpox sometime between 3 and 4-o-clock on Sunday, June 16; buried shortly after midnight; service given at 10:00 am same day.” This kind of haste was common then - corpses had to be buried quickly and kept from others in the community.

In 1700 as many as one in five of all deaths were caused by smallpox, but by the beginning of the 19th century, this horrible disease was starting to be controlled. Inoculation, the practise of developing immunity by exposing someone to a mild form of the disease (by opening a vein and introducing puss directly into the blood), had been discovered in the Middle East and was brought to England early in the 18th century. It was widespread by the 1750s. Then, the turn of the century saw the introduction of inoculation with cowpox, or vaccination as it became known.

At first, only the wealthy were inoculated, but eventually the authorities realised the benefits of inoculating the poor as well and began to pay for the introduction of the practise in the poorest neighbourhoods throughout the country and then, in the middle of the 19th century, to legislate mandatory vaccination for everyone. This was the first example of a disciplined public health policy, and although occasional outbreaks continued until as late as 1881, it was a success. By the 1850s, in the rural health district of Halstead, Essex (which included the village of Toppesfield, where my ancestor Edward Nice and his family lived), less than one half of one percent of all deaths were attributed to smallpox. By the 1880s there were no smallpox cases reported at all.

The 19th century saw a steady progression of other public health initiatives.

The first public health act was passed in 1848. Others followed in 1872 and 1875.

The “Great Stink” of 1858, when the stench of untreated human waste in the Thames was so strong that it prevented work in the courts and in the House of Commons, prompted the authorities to finally deal with the raw sewage that was ending up in the river. Over the following ten years modern sewers and pumping stations were constructed to carry waste down river past the city.

At the same time water distribution companies started taking advantage of the availability of steam engines to pump cleaner drinking and washing water from further upstream on the Thames into most areas of London. Soap was by then also becoming much cheaper and more readily available. 

The public health act of 1875 governed water supply and sewage, including the construction of new toilets. Henceforth these had to have at least one outside wall with a window, their own water supply and a separate pipe leading to a sewer. That year the Artisans and Labourers Dwellings Act empowered local authorities to demolish housing with inadequate drainage or sewage disposal facilities.

The Impact on Woolwich

Slowly these measures and others began to change the quality of life for people living in England, with a direct affect on their life expectancy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Woolwich. Surrounding the Royal Docks, the Royal Arsenal and a large army barracks, this London neighbourhood grew rapidly in the second half of the 19th century.

Many of my ancestors moved to Woolwich at that time: John Street and his family in 1861, Harry Berryman and his family in 1889, Alfred Nice and his brother and sister and their families in the 1890s and Richard Campbell and his son in 1903.

An analysis of records published by Free BMD at freebmd.org.uk shows that in 1869 the average age at death in Woolwich was 25 and the median age (the age below which half of all deaths occurred) was just 10. Almost 38% of all deaths in the neighbourhood were children under the age of two and only a quarter of those who survived childhood could expect to live to age 65 or beyond. These statistics are not much different from those of the Clapham of sixty years earlier, where the average age at death was 24 and the median age was six, but where 32% of adults could expect to pass 65.

By contrast, in the Halstead district in 1867 the average age at death was 38 and the median age was 35, and amongst those who survived childhood almost half could expect to live past 65. The countryside really was healthier in those days.

Jump forward to 1907 and the picture has changed for the better. That year the average age at death in Woolwich was 32 and the median age was 27. Amongst those who survived childhood almost 40% could expect to live past 65. This was a big change in 40 years, but the contrast with Halstead had grown even greater. There, the average age at death had increased to 50 and the median age was 60. Some 60% of all adults could expect to live past 65.

After that, though, Woolwich’s statistics improve dramatically and the gap with Halstead narrows. By 1927 the average age at death in Woolwich was 53, compared to 65 in Halstead, and the median age was 62 compared to 70 (yes, by 1927 half of all people who died in Halstead died past the age of 70!). By 1947 the average age at death in Woolwich had leaped to 64 and the median age was 69. In Halstead the comparable numbers were 69 and 73 respectively. The biggest factor driving these numbers was the drop in infant mortality, from 38% in 1869 to just 5% in 1947.

These numbers are astounding. In Woolwich between 1869 and 1947 the median age of death increased from ten years to 69. And yet this was in an era before the introduction of universal health care, before the widespread use of antibiotics and before the introduction of MRIs, CatScans, ultrasounds, defibrillators, pacemakers, lung transplants, open heart surgery and every other modern medical miracle.

In the 78 years between 1869 and 1947 the average age at death in Woolwich increased from 25 to 64. In the 65 years since 1947 the average age at death in Woolwich has only increased to 72. So much for modern medicine!

The Impact on My Family

The decline in infant mortality meant that women no longer needed to bear a dozen or more children just to ensure that some would survive to become adults. Average family size fell significantly after 1900, which meant that each family had more money for food,medicine and clothing for their children, who grew up healthier as a result.

This can be seen in my family. John and Sarah Brand lived in Saffron Walden in Essex. They were married in 1818 and went on to have five children. Young Sarah was 11 weeks old when she died in 1819; George was four when he died in 1832; Esther was seven when she died in 1839. Henry lived to age 25 before he died in of consumption in 1845. By then, consumption had already taken John. Only Samuel, my great, great grandfather, lived long enough to marry and have children.

Samuel Brand married Mary Ann Roberts in 1850 and went on to have five children before Mary Ann died of consumption in 1863. John died of consumption at the age of seven in 1866. Evelyn died at 15 in 1869. Emma died a month before Evelyn a the age of 18. Two other children, Sarah and Ellen (my great grandmother) lived on into old age.

Ellen Brand married Freddie Hickford in 1880 and went on to have 11 children between 1881 and 1905. Only four died before marrying. Ellen’s youngest daughter, Elsie, my grandmother, married Dick Campbell in 1927. They had only three children who all survived to have families of their own.

Similar stories can be seen in every branch of my family. In most cases my ancestors who survived childhood went on to live very long lives.

Perhaps the most ironic story I can tell is of Lucy Chuter’s two families. I’ve written before about how one was a prosperous middle class family of doctors and the other was a working class family of soldiers, night watchmen and the like. In the family of doctors the average age at death of Lucy’s six grandchildren was just 60. In the other family Lucy’s six grandchildren died at an average age of 81!

The Life and Legacy of Lucy Chuter

Born the daughter of a carpenter in 1774, my 4th great grandmother Lucy Chuter married a gentleman 46 years her senior, became a wealthy widow at 34, but then turned away from her wealth and position in society to become a farmer’s wife at 36. Her legacy is reflected in the lives of two very different families.

Lucy grew up in the tiny rural village of Byfleet, Surrey, the second of eight children to be born to Henry Chuter and his wife Mary. According to the Gentleman’s Magazine Henry was “a man well respected,” but he was still only a tradesman in a time when position and title meant everything.

We have nothing to tell us about Lucy's early life. Sometime in the 1790s she moved to London, but what she was doing there is unknown, and how she met William Eves is a mystery.

William was elderly, twice widowed and wealthy, with large investments in property, stocks and bonds and ownership of five buildings in the London borough of Westminster and three in the genteel suburban village of Clapham, south of the River Thames. The Westminster properties were all clustered just steps from the Houses of Parliament, one of them rented out as a well-known pub called the Westminster Arms. His Clapham properties included a coach house and stables and two large houses. One was his home.

We don’t know how or where Lucy was living when she and William met, so we can only speculate about how their relationship started. William was 71 and Lucy was 24. Was Lucy attracted to William’s money? Was William only interested in a “romp in the hay” with an attractive servant girl?

Lucy gave birth to a son in 1799. William then did something astounding. Were Lucy simply a prostitute he could have ignored mother and child, if a house servant he could have dismissed her, paying her off with no further obligations. But that’s not what William did: he acknowledged the child as his own.

He and Lucy baptised the baby Augustus Eves in November 1799. However, although willing to acknowledge Augustus publicly, it seems William didn’t want the acknowledgement to be very loud, because the ceremony took place in a church in Lambeth, and not in Clapham, where William lived.

What then made William very publicly defy the rigid norms of the day to take Lucy as his third wife? A year after Augustus’ birth he married Lucy in the Parish Church in Clapham.

When Lucy moved into William’s home she began a life unimaginably distant from her roots in Byfleet. Her neighbours included the “Saints”, a group of evangelical Christians led by the Member of Parliament William Wilberforce. They campaigned for all the important social issues of the day, most famously the abolition of the slave trade. Other neighbours included Henry Cavendish, the discoverer of hydrogen and the first to measure the density of the earth; Henry Thornton, the founder of Sierre Leone; and Charles Grant, chairman of the British East India Company. How did they and their families react to this young woman moving into William's big house? Did they overlook her background and accept her into their circle? How would William's servants have treated her, this girl who had been just one of them before the wedding? And how did William's family react to Lucy's arrival amongst them?

William died at the age of 80 in 1808, the victim of a “decay in nature,” and was interred in the family burial ground.

William’s will is interesting reading, especially for what it says about William’s attitude towards his children, or perhaps their relationship with him in the last years of his life. He left an astounding £1,000 to his youngest son, Augustus, but just £150 to William and £75 to George. He didn’t even acknowledge his four daughters, but did leave £30 to each of his daughters’ four children.

The house in Clapham was left to Lucy. She also had the right to the rents from all of William’s other properties, although he wanted the properties themselves to pass to his children when she died.

William's children must have been furious to learn he had appointed Lucy as his executor. We can only imagine the reaction of his eldest surviving son, William, when he learned he was to receive only £150 and would have to wait until Lucy died before getting his hands on his father's properties. Ironically, he was 20 years Lucy's senior, so the likelihood he would outlive her would have been remote indeed.

Lucy was now just 34, and with her son Augustus probably at a boarding school she was free to enjoy her status as a young financially secure widow in Clapham, perhaps to prowl for another eligible husband even further up the social scale. So why, then, did she return to Byfleet, and why did she two years later marry a farmer from the nearby town of Chertsey?

James Berryman was of stout yeoman stock. His family had been farming in the Chertsey area for hundreds of years, never very wealthy, but not in poverty either. By marrying him Lucy was in a way returning to her roots, as if her interlude with William Eves had never happened.

Lucy and James raised a son James and a daughter Lucy. They were married for 29 years when Lucy died at the age of 65 in 1840. The death must have been mystifying because a coroner’s jury was convened, reporting the cause of death to be an “act of God.”

We have more detail about James’ death five years later. He died from Erysipelas, a streptococcus infection commonly known at the time as “Rose,” because of the colour it turned the victim’s skin, or “St Antony's Fire,” because of its burning heat. He was diagnosed on Sunday, September 28^th, 1845. His doctor must have told him the infection was fatal, because James drew up a new will the following day. According to a servant who was present at the time, William succumbed to the disease four days later.

Lucy's two sons, Augustus Eves, and his half-brother James Berryman, led divergent lives and left different legacies.

Augustus became a widely respected doctor, a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, remembered for his pioneering operations, his principled stand against blood-letting and his early interest in blood transfusions. He was a prolific writer and a keen observer, authoring a medical text book while still in his 20s, and chronicling his experiments and observations in articles and letters to the British Medical Journal, the Lancet and other journals. His most famous operation is documented in Harold Ellis’ 1994 book Surgical Case Studies from the Past.

One of the highlights of Augustus’ life came on March 7^th, 1860, when he attended at Queen Victoria’s court. He was presented to her Majesty by the Earl of Ducie.

Augustus’ children themselves became doctors or married them. One son, Charles Thick Eves, became a military surgeon, with a successful career in India, retiring as a Brigadier and Deputy Surgeon General. A daughter, Maria, married Augustus' medical partner. She and her husband, Charles Templeman Speer, became renowned spiritualists in London. A grandson became a celebrated musician at the turn of the 20th century in London. Slowly, though, Augustus' line withered and disappeared, most of his descendants dying relatively young with few or no children. The last of the line was gone from the record by the early 1900s.

Augustus' half-brother James Berryman became a farmer, like his father, but he wasn’t as successful. He soon gave up farming to become a relieving officer (an official appointed to distribute relief to the poor and to admit them to the workhouse) and then one of the first police officers for the town of Guildford in Surrey. When he died of tuberculosis in 1856 at the age of 42, he left his wife to somehow care for six children - the youngest just four months old.

One of James’ sons, Harry Berryman, enlisted in the army at the age of 18. He had a good career, learning to read and write and learning the trade of blacksmithing and rising to the rank of Sergeant before retiring to run a pub in Buckinghamshire. He was my great great grandfather.

Lucy Chuter’s grandsons Charles Thick Eves and Harry Berryman served in India at the same time in the late 19th century. Harry was then a corporal in the Royal Artillery, Charles a Surgeon Major in the Indian Army. Did they ever meet? Could they ever have imagined that they were cousins?

Lucy’s descendants are now spread through England, Canada and Australia. I wonder how much of her independence and adventurous character live on in them today.

Was Elizabeth Tremain murdered?

Elizabeth Mary Tremain died a painful death. The deputy coroner for the city of Bristol in England conducted an autopsy the day after she passed away in June 1901 at the Bristol Royal Infirmary, recording the cause of death to be “pneumonia following accidental burns.” What was my great great grandmother Elizabeth’s story?

She was born Elizabeth Lansdown in 1842 in the small rural village of Elberton, Gloucestershire (population 180). She started life as an unschooled milkmaid, but somehow found enough education to be able to write her own signature on her marriage certificate when she married a farm labourer named William Willcox in 1864. William died in 1885, when he was just 43, after a horse kicked him in the head. He lingered five days before succumbing to his injury, leaving Elizabeth alone to care for eight children.

Elizabeth continued to live in the family home at 5 Schubert Cottages in the Bristol suburb of Horfield. We can only speculate how she and her family managed to survive. In 1889 she married George Tremain, a farm labourer from Devon, who was 18 years her junior. The couple may have been nervous or guilty when they wed in the local register office: both lied about their age, George claiming to be two years older than he was and Elizabeth two years younger, and on the marriage certificate Elizabeth spelt her name three different ways, reversing her first and middle names in the process. Did she know then that George had been released from the gaol in Plymouth just a year earlier, after serving a six month sentence for “Servant Larceny”? And did she know that a court order had been issued to force him to pay child support of 1s 6d per week for an illegitimate baby he’d fathered in 1881?

The 1891 census return lists Elizabeth’s sons and daughters as George’s stepchildren, even though one of them, Sarah, was just seven years younger than him. At the time of the 1901 census Sarah was still unmarried and living with Elizabeth and George, even though she was by then 31. George had just turned 40; Elizabeth was 58.

Elizabeth died two months after the 1901 census.

Elizabeth’s daughter Sarah was still living with George when the 1911 census was taken, working at home as a dress maker. Then in 1914, when she was 44, Sarah and George were married.

So here are my questions: Why did George, a young man of 28, marry a 47-year-old mother of eight? How did Elizabeth come to be burned? Why did Sarah never move away from her mother’s home? What kind of relationship did Sarah have with George before her mother died? Does this circumstantial evidence point to a murder? What other clues still exist, and how can we find them?