Bravery and Babies: The Destruction of the Troopship Alert

Practically forgotten today, the sinking of the troopship Alert in 1843 was in its time considered an astounding story of leadership, widely cited as an example to all soldiers in the British army. This little-remembered adventure is particularly interesting to me because one of the soldiers aboard the Alert when it was wrecked was my 4th Great Grand Uncle, Samuel Lang.

Born the son of a thatcher in Ugborough, Devon in 1804, Sam “took the King’s Shilling” in Plymouth in 1825 (he actually received two shillings and sixpence on enlistment), enlisting in the 64th Regiment of Foot. After training in Jersey he joined his regiment in Gibraltar for three years. The regiment returned to England in 1830, but was then posted to Jamaica in 1834 and from there to Halifax in Canada, in 1840.

Life in a British infantry regiment in early Victorian times was treacherous; not because of the dangers of battle, but rather the risk of disease. The regimental history, written in 1883, records that “After the arrival of the Regiment at Gibraltar, they suffered considerably from pulmonary complaints, particularly when occupying the barracks on Windmill Hill, and subsequently ophthalmic cases were numerous, owing to the arduous services the regiment had to perform at the North Front, where they were much exposed to shifting sands, when strong and often fatal Levant winds prevailed.” It goes on to report on the terrible loss of life in Jamaica to Yellow Fever, which killed off the majority of the officers and many of the men. An English newspaper report from 1835 claimed there were so many deaths amongst the soldiers serving there that the cost of the wood for making coffins had increased by 15%.

In contrast, Sam’s period in Canada was quiet and uneventful. He and the other soldiers in the regiment faced harsh winters, which were a shock after six years in Jamaica, but their only excitement came when they fought the many house fires afflicting Halifax in that time. He must have been happy, then, when he and the rest of the soldiers of the 64th drew up in three ranks on the dock in Halifax on June 30th 1843 to receive a formal farewell from all the town’s citizens as the regiment prepared to sail back to England. The ceremony ended with a proclamation from the mayor in which he thanked the regiment for their service as an unofficial fire brigade. The ceremony over, the first contingent of the soldiers embarked the same day for the voyage back home.

Sam was in the last contingent and had to wait until July 9th, when he and 200 other soldiers and 95 women and children finally boarded the Alert, a 500 ton sailing ship newly built and untested, making ready for its first trip across the Atlantic. It departed Halifax harbour in favourable weather the next day.

The wind strengthened soon after they set sail, and by that first evening, it had blown into a strong gale, accompanied by torrential rain. The passengers had a terrible sleepless night below decks, wet and seasick and cold. Then, according to newspaper reports, at 2.00 AM the ship struck a rock just 80 miles from Halifax.

There was widespread panic on board (“the greatest state of excitement” as the newspapers reported), with the passengers all crowding onto the deck and risking the foundering of the ship. Captain Daley, master of the Alert, and Captain Draper, the officer commanding the troops, struggled to bring calm and restore discipline. They ordered some of the soldiers to the pumps and convinced the rest of the men and their families to go back below decks. Draper ordered all his officers to set an example by staying below with their men.

Daley steered the ship toward the nearest land, which he could just make out in the distance. The water was now coming in so fast that the pumps couldn’t keep up. Soon it was above the knees of the soldiers below decks. It must have been terrifying down there: overcrowded, rolling, dark, noisy, people throwing up, and strange things floating in the rising sea water flowing in through the splintered hull; and yet amongst the soldiers there was now absolute silence and calm. Children and wives may have been crying, but the men uttered not one word until after a long, agonising hour the Alert violently collided with tiny Goose Island.

The force of the impact forced her almost on her side, before she righted herself and started to subside. The newspapers reported that there was now “great confusion” and “excitement among the troops increased to an alarming extent” as the soldiers’ discipline broke again. Believing the ship to be breaking up and sinking, the soldiers and their families rushed for the ship’s boats.

Captain Draper and his officers and NCOs struggled to stem this widespread panic and then to organise the evacuation. Somehow, during that violent night, three soldier’s wives had delivered babies, and now all three were brought up from below and lowered into the boats still on their beds, with their newborns clutched to their bosoms. Other women and children were evacuated too, before the soldiers themselves began climbing down into the boats. For almost two hours they plied the broken ship’s boats to the beach and back, ferrying all the passengers just a handful at a time. The sun had risen over the wreck when the last of the survivors were brought ashore. 

Everyone was forlorn, soaked and cold, but they were all safe. Not a single life had been lost, although now they were shipwrecked on a desolate, uninhabited island just 300 ft wide by 1,500 ft long.

Now Draper kept everyone busy. The sailors made more trips back to the wreck to recover spars and canvas sails and food and water. The soldiers began surveying the island and building cabins with the materials scavenged from the ship. Draper imposed a daily routine and everyone responded well to his discipline.

After ten days the survivors were rescued by the sloop HMS Rose, and by a lighter dispatched from Halifax. As was later reported, they ended their ordeal “without a sick person, or any flagrant breach of discipline.”

This was a remarkable feat of leadership, for which Captain Daley and Captain Draper were later both praised. Many lives would have been lost if the officers hadn’t restored discipline at the height of the confusion. The Duke of Wellington himself claimed that the behaviour of all the troops “throughout the transaction is praiseworthy, and by its result must render manifest to all the advantage of subordination, and the strict obedience to orders under the most extraordinary circumstances in which men can be placed in the performance of their duty in the service of Her Majesty.”

The survivors arrived in Halifax with only the clothes on their backs. The people of that town who had just a few weeks before been thanking these soldiers for their unofficial fire fighting duties, now took up a collection to pay for enough clothing and bedding for their second voyage back to England. The 64th re-embarked on the troopship Premier, for an apparently uneventful 17-day trip to Portsmouth, arriving home on August 22nd, 1843.

Much was subsequently written about the heroism of the officers in this incident, but nothing about the individual soldiers. We can only guess at the role Sam played: the only record is in his medical report on discharge three years later, which reported that he had suffered two ruptures caused by lifting heavy weights during the shipwreck.

For all his sickness and disease and his ruptures, Sam survived into his old age, passing away only in 1875, at the age of 71. No doubt the story of the wreck of the troopship Able won him many a pint along the way.

Was Mary Anne Took a prostitute?

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 11^th, 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 4^th, 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.

Why was Annie Campbell in Dover in 1900?

What the heck was Annie Campbell doing in Dover, Kent in 1900? There are many unanswered questions in our family history, but few are as intriguing as the mystery of why my grandfather Richard Campbell was born in that port on England’s southeast coast.

I have vivid memories of my grandfather, although he passed away in 1974, when I was only a teenager. I was living in Canada then, and saw him perhaps just a dozen times and exchanged fewer than a dozen letters. Yet the strength of his personality, the vividness of his stories (and the stories others told of him) and the perspectives of his worldview are fresh in my mind still.

He was a working class renaissance man, an opinionated self-taught romantic intellectual with a powerful sense of justice and honour. Leaving school at 12, he satisfied his hunger for education through a lifetime of self-learning, reading Shakespeare and teaching himself geometry and mathematics in his 20s; learning to play the violin and joining an orchestra in his 30s; and qualifying as a City and Guilds carpenter in his 40s.

An incurable romantic, Richard revelled in his memories of India in the early 1920s. These were the very best days of his life, days of excitement and adventure, of vibrant colour and raw passion, and he felt strongly the contrast with all the dreary and bleak days that came after.

He delighted in the role he had played as a soldier in the grand epic tale of the British Empire: riding to the relief of the beleaguered British forces in Amritsar after the massacre of protesting Indians in that city in 1919; driving a gun carriage up the Khyber Pass on the North West Frontier during the Third Afghan War; chasing Mahatma Gandhi through the alleys and streets of Agra.

Richard never again experienced that heart-pounding excitement. He returned to a cold, economically depressed England of poverty, inadequate housing and poor health care, where he struggled to find meaningful work. His family - his wife Elsie and his children, Elsie, Richard and Margaret - became the biggest part of his life. He would do anything for them, often scheming elaborate plans to acquire the presents he believed they deserved.

He was a dreamer. Like “Pop” Larkin, the hero of The Darling Buds of May, he always had something on the go: fiddling money at the pub where he worked, or on his milk route; growing tobacco in his back garden and curing it in his kitchen; opening a used electrical goods store; starting a mail order foreign postage stamp company; loan sharking money to Elsie’s coworkers; keeping rubbish bins of home-brewed beer in his hall cupboard; the schemes never seemed to end.

And he dreamed of escaping from England. To Australia, perhaps, or to Canada. He never left, but all his children did. He found it hard to see his family move so far away, but he encouraged them to create their lives somewhere better.

Elsie left him too, in 1953, struck down by a sudden and devastating stroke. He grieved for a year.

Richard was a man of his time, a chain-smoking borderline alcoholic who believed it was his wife’s job to prepare Sunday dinner while he was at the pub. He had an opinion on everything, but his strongest opinions were reserved for foreigners. He didn’t think much of them, or to be more precise, he didn’t think much of them being in London, taking jobs from him and his mates. His most passionate diatribes were reserved for the Irish. They were lazy, hard drinking and undeserving. They belonged back in Ireland. So how ironic that after he died we discovered that he wasn’t English after all. He was, well, Irish.

We were told that Richard’s father had run away from home to join the army, and been disowned by his family (who either ran a pub or owned a construction company). Richard’s mother had died giving birth in the family home while his father was serving in the cavalry in South Africa in the Second Boer War. Richard had then been raised by foster parents, Mr. and Mrs. Hollywell, in Woolwich, London and had seen little of his father while he was young.

From Richard’s birth certificate we learned he had been born in Dover, his mother’s name was Annie Conroy, and she couldn’t have died in childbirth, because she was the one who had registered the birth. After much fruitless searching back in pre-Internet days, we gave up looking for a record of a marriage of Annie Conroy and Richard Campbell in England.

We had a breakthrough in 1996, when we discovered a marriage in Ireland of a Richard Campbell and a Mary Anne Conroy, which had taken place exactly 100 years earlier.

Here’s what we’ve now pieced together:

Richard’s father arrived in Lucknow in India in 1889, where he was posted to a cavalry regiment called the 17th Lancers. Most of his military career is a mystery, because his documents are missing from “WO97 Chelsea” as the records at The National Archives of 19th century British soldiers are known.

The 17th Lancers returned to England in 1890. Richard was recorded being with the regiment at Shorncliffe Camp in Kent in the 1891 census, although confusingly he gives his place of birth as Lancaster, Lancashire.

The regiment was based in Leeds in 1896, when Richard and Annie were married. Richard gave a Dublin address and listed his occupation as “Servant,” even though he must have still been in the army.

The 17th Lancers were posted to Ireland in 1897, where they stayed until they were sent to South Africa in January 1900 to reinforce the British army fighting the Boers. They sailed for South Africa from Liverpool and London. When Richard was born in July 1900, his father was rounding up the remnants of the Boer army after their defeat at the Battle of Diamond Hill.

Annie took Richard to Dublin where she died three months after Richard was born. When the 1901 census was taken on March 31st, he was being cared for by Annie’s parents, Thomas and Mary.

Richard’s father returned from South Africa in 1902. He retired from the army sometime between then and 1905, when the 17th Lancers were posted to India.

Sometime between 1901 and 1911 Richard returned from Dublin and lived for at least some of the time with foster parents Bill and Margaret Hollywell. Bill had served in the 17th Lancers until 1894, where he must have met Richard’s father. Richard loved them like his own parents, even naming his second daughter after his surrogate mum.  By the time of the 1911 census, father and son were united and living in Plumstead, near Woolwich.

Margaret lived with Richard and his family in the 1930s after Bill died. Richard’s own father became an in-pensioner at the Chelsea Hospital, a retirement home for former soldiers and lived there until he died in 1937.

So many open questions.

How did Richard’s father and mother meet? Why did his father claim his occupation to be a servant on his marriage certificate when he was actually serving in the army? Why did he list his place of birth on the 1891 census as Lancashire when all other documents point to Dublin?

What was the reason for Annie to be in Dover, Kent in July 1900? The 17th Lancers had been in Ireland before they left for South Africa and they’d not been anywhere near Dover. Why did Annie go back to Dublin after Richard was born?

Why did Richard’s father settle in Woolwich and not in Ireland after he left the army? What brought him to travel to Dublin to take custody of the toddler he’d never known? How did he have the courage to be a single father at a time when this was almost unheard of?

And why did Richard take in Margaret Hollywell after Bill died, and yet was content to see his own father go to the Chelsea Hospital?

What kind of relationship did Richard's parents have? Were they living a love story? Will we ever know?

The Nice family in the British Newspaper Archive

Today it’s easy to trace a family through the birth, marriage and death records available online by subscription or for free from various sites. In just a few minutes I can find the records proving that my great grandfather Alfred Nice died in 1952, married in 1899 and was born in 1873. His father, Arthur Nice died in 1899, married in 1863 and was born in 1842. His father, Edward - well, you understand my point.

But to know a birthday or a wedding date is not to know the person - our ancestors weren’t just names and dates. What did they do? How did they feel? What were their personalities? How were they like me, and how were they not? To answer these questions we have to interpret the information in the the birth, marriage and death records and to search for other records to find some insight, however small, into each personality.

Searching for these records is still not easy, despite the power of the internet. Not everything is on line and not everything can be trusted. It can be a tedious job searching for that one name or that one reference that fills in another gap in the jigsaw puzzle.

But now the British Library has began placing its archive of newspapers on line (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk), in partnership with brightsolid, the company that owns findmypast.co.uk. Their plan is to scan, index and publish 40 million newspaper pages, with over five million available now. This is a wonderful source of background information for anyone tracing ancestors in the UK. I believe it will soon become one of the most important sites for genealogical research. It’s already on my top ten list.

Let me show you just how significant this source can be by focusing on one branch of my family for the sixty years they lived in one rural Essex village.

Toppesfield sits in an area of gently rolling hills in the northeast of Essex. The church is on a high point where it can be seen from all directions. The only industry in the village and surrounding parish is agriculture, as it has been for hundreds of years. Toppesfield suffered heavily in the agricultural depression of the late 19th century. Its population drifted down from some 1,000 persons in the 1840s to perhaps 600 at the turn of the 20th century. It's been stable since then: the population in 2001 was 533.

The Nice family arrived in Toppesfield in the 1840s, when Edward Nice, a wheelwright, moved here from the nearby village of Belchamp Walter.

Edward had seven children by two wives: Susan Smee and after she died, her sister Rachel. Miraculously for the time, all seven children survived into their adult years.

Edward’s oldest, Arthur, had ten children of his own, one of them my great grandfather Alfred Nice. Arthur’s brother Harry and his sister Clara both married and had children of their own, but the other four siblings, Susan, Alma, Clara and Jessie, remained single all their lives.

All of Edward’s children, except one, and all his grandchildren eventually moved away from Toppesfield. By the 1890s his son Alma was the last of Edward’s family still in the village. The link was broken when Alma died in 1924.

The newspaper coverage of 19th century Toppesfield is remarkably similar to the coverage I see from our local community newspaper here in the small town where I live now: fund raising events, garden parties and the occasional crime. This makes me think we’re not seeing a balanced picture. Certainly the local papers weren’t covering the impact of the agricultural depression and Toppesfield’s resulting slow decline into poverty, or the vast social upheavals that came with the railway, compulsory education and other 19th century changes.

But we still have a rich picture of life in Toppesfield: a farmer fined for allowing two cows to wander on a public roadway; youngsters caught setting hay alight with matches; a farm workers’ union rally controversially aided by the rector of the church; arson, probably caused by agricultural labourers protesting low wages and high unemployment; farm labourers wandering drunk on the highway; and petty theft of all kinds.

And there’s a surprising amount about my family.

The family enters the newspaper archives with an entry from March 10th 1843. The Essex Standard commented on the uncertainty of life, citing the example of Edward’s father, Richard Nice, who suddenly “fell down in a fit and expired shortly after.” Richard had enjoyed remarkably good health and always maintained an excellent character for honesty, sobriety, and industry. He was just 64.

Edward and Rachel must have instilled a love of learning in their children. Three of their four girls became teachers, all rising to be head mistresses. Emily was the only one of the girls to marry, which meant she had to resign her teaching position, but she passed her passion on to her own children: three of her four girls also went on to be teachers, one remaining unmarried and rising to be a head mistress too.

The first of the children to begin teaching was Emily. Her career was meteoric. In 1871 she was a student at the Whitelands Training School in Chelsea, London (one of the most respected teacher colleges in England then and still today) but according to the Essex Newsman, by the time she married in 1876 at the age of 24, she was already headmistress of St. John’s School in Moulsham, Essex.

Clara was next to take up the profession. In November 1882 the Chelmsford Chronicle was pleased to notice Clara’s name in the list of successful candidates for scholarships. She was second on the list in order of merit amongst those who graduated from the two year program at Hockerill Teaching College.

By then she was already teaching. The National School in Toppesfield had been examined on April 5th, 1882. According to the resulting report, “Reading is somewhat weak in the first standard, but elsewhere, and especially in the second and third standards, it is fluent, distinct, and expressive. Handwriting is fairly good. Spelling is fairly accurate. Arithmetic is weak in the fourth standard, but very fair elsewhere. Discipline is good. Singing and needlework the same. The infants are a fairly good class.” The article reporting these results also mentioned that Clara Nice had finished her apprenticeship as pupil teacher and had been engaged as assistant mistress. She would eventually become Head Teacher at the Effra Street School for Girls and Infants in Wimbledon, Surrey. Toppesfield’s National School would continue to set high standards: in 2011 its successor would be recognized as the primary school achieving the highest academic standards on standardized tests in all of England.

A third sister Jessie successfully passed her entrance examination for Hockerill College in July 1886, winning a first-class scholarship for the two-year teaching diploma program. She figures prominently in the press for more than just her teaching. When she came home for the holidays at Christmas 1887 she took on the challenge of decorating the altar rails in the village church, a job she executed very “tastefully”, according to the Essex Standard. In 1909 and again in 1912 she judged the needlework and drawing at the annual show of the Toppesfield Cottage Garden Society, which was held on the grounds of Toppesfield Hall. By then Jessie was a spinster and the head teacher at the National School in the nearby village of Great Yeldham, so no doubt she was a respected member of the village community.

How ironic then that the sisters’ older brother Arthur, my great great grandfather, appeared before the Heddingham Petty Sessions in November 1885, to be fined 1 shilling, with 4 shillings costs, for neglecting to send his children regularly to school (At the same session young Kate and Arthur Twitchett, niece and nephew of my mother’s grand aunt Ellen Hickford living in the nearby village of Ashen, were each fined two shillings and sixpence for stealing beans and beanstalks with a value of one shilling and sixpence. They were 13 and 12 at the time). Arthur was called before the court again in August 1888 and fined another 1 shilling, with 4 shillings costs, for failing to keep his 12-year-old daughter Lottie in school.

These weren’t Arthur’s first court appearances. He was first called before the Heddingham Petty Sessions on February 13th, 1872, two days after the birth of his fourth child, where he was convicted of stealing three bushels of chaff and two bushels of mangel wurzel (a kind of root beet) from a farmer. He was sentenced to serve 21 days’ imprisonment.

Arthur was caught in another noteworthy event when in 1883 the house where he and his family were living was destroyed by fire. It was owned by his wife Rosavena Hardy’s stepfather James Butcher. According to the Wyyenhoe and Colchester Regatta, the fire was “supposed” to have been caused by a spark from the chimney, which ignited the thatch roof.

James Butcher appears not to have been a very sympathetic figure. He ran the village grocery shop and was also called a higler by some people - a somewhat derogatory term to describe an untrustworthy pedlar - and often came to the attention of the local newspapers.

The first time was in March 1854, when he appeared before the bench to answer to a charge of theft. Then 27-years-old, James was accused of partnering with a 14-year-old farm hand named Jeremiah Hardy to steal half a bushel of beans from a local farmer, James Nunn.

Two weeks before the trial James stopped at Nunn’s farmyard to pick up some fowl he’d purchased. The farm bailiff saw James talking with Jeremiah, who worked for Nunn, and who should have been feeding pigs. He then saw the two disappear into the granary. After James left on his pony and cart the bailiff went into the granary and immediately noticed that some beans were missing.

Nunn found Police Constable Cook and together they went to James’ cottage. James had no objections to PC Cook entering to search the premises, but protested when Cook went to climb into the attic. Upstairs, Cook found a box with various beans mixed together.

James claimed the beans were the remainder of four bushels purchased the previous November from another farmer. When that farmer was called as a witness he confirmed that he had sold the beans to James, but when the prosecutor showed the farmer the beans found in James’ cottage the farmer expressed surprise: “These aren’t my beans; my beans were black, these are white!” which brought laughter to the court.

James then testified that Jeremiah Hardy had indeed given him some beans but only a few - certainly not enough to be considered “theft” - and only to be feed for the birds he'd purchased. His lawyer also argued there was no evidence the beans presented in court were the identical beans taken or received, despite sworn testimony from Nunn to that effect.

James’ lawyer then called up a shop-keeper as a character witness. He would have called another, he explained, but the second one had missed his train and wasn’t in the court.

The Judge summed up by saying that the quantity taken was immaterial - even half an ounce of beans would have been an equal crime, “and with regard to his view of the transaction, how could a man like the prisoner suppose that a boy of 14 had any right to dispose of his master’s property?

“Verdict: Guilty.”

Nunn then recommended mercy for Jeremiah, believing James Butcher had drawn him into the crime.

The Judge responded by saying “the offence of Butcher in teaching a little boy like the other prisoner to steal, was a very serious one. He almost doubted if he satisfied the justice of the case by a sentence of 8 months’ hard labour. With respect to the boy, he should attend with the geatest pleasure to [Nunn’s] recommendation; and hoped a sentence of one month’s imprisonment would deter him from being guilty of similar practises in future.”

James' eight months of hard labour didn’t deter him from all crime. He was back in court in September 1856, charged with “using a pair of unjust scales, 1 ounce deficient against the purchaser.” He was fined 2s. 6d and costs of 9s. 6d., which he paid on the spot.

Fifteen years passed before James again came to the attention of the law. He made history of a sort when he was prosecuted under the Public Health (Water) Act of 1878. This was the first prosecution under the new act in the area, and, according to the clerk of the Halstead Union Rural Sanitary Authority, possibly in all the country.

James owned three cottages in the nearby village of Little Yeldham. The Sanitary Authority twice issued notices to him ordering the provision to the cottages of “wholesome water sufficient for the consumption and domestic use of the inmates.” When he failed to respond to either of these the Authority itself provided this access and passed the cost on to James. Then, in 1881 James was summoned for failing to pay £13 12s., his portion of the Authority’s costs.

In his defence James claimed that one of the cottages was now vacant: the tenant had left without paying him any rent. The clerk of the Authority responded “That is one of the unfortunate results of having cottage property, but it does not affect the question.” James then argued that the cost he was being assessed was too high for the work that had been done. The clerk answered back “Unfortunately for you it has been proved to the contrary.” 

The Chairman of the bench asked James if he could read, as “he appeared to have taken no notice whatever of the notices sent to him.” James claimed that he had been advised to take no notice of them.

The bench found James guilty, ordering him to pay the amount owing plus 12s 6d. for costs. James paid the full amount before leaving the court.

By 1884 James’ son James the younger held an “off” beer license. That year he applied to move it from a cottage on one side of the road to a cottage on the other. There was some question about whether James had complied with the Standing Orders because he hadn’t submitted the license application in writing, but had instead brought it that morning in person. He argued that he only wanted to transfer the license because he needed more room for his growing family, his father owned both properties, and his wife had already moved there. The Committee granted the application.

James passed away in 1892, apparently passing his businesses on to his son. By then the family was well on its way to respectability with only positive stories appearing in the newspapers. For example, in July 1892 James the younger was noted as a major buyer of Shropshire lambs at the annual Haverhill lamb sale and in 1896 the newspapers wrote of James’ support for Toppesfield’s May Day celebrations by providing a wagon decorated to be the May Queen’s carriage for her parade through the village. James’ daughter Daisy appeared in the parade as one of the Queen’s maids.

Other members of the extended family gained some notoriety too. At a meeting of the Halstead District Board of Governors in October 1881 the Board found that a cousin of Arthur’s, George Allen, was guilty of overcrowding, housing eight adults and three children in a cottage with three bedrooms together amounting to just 2,000 cubic feet in area (if the ceilings were seven feet high, this would mean the three bedrooms would total some 285 sq ft in total, or perhaps just nine feet by ten feet each).

The Medical Officer made a report to the same meeting, noting that “there is still not a proper water supply for the cottages in the Chase-lane below Toppesfield church.” He reported that Scarlett Fever had broken out in Toppesfield in October 1880. Twenty eight cases occured, resulting in three deaths. All the effected cottages were disinfected. He went on to remind the Governors that bylaws are still needed to control drainage and the building of privies and pig styes and then reported that there had been four illegitimate births in Toppesfield in the previous year.

William Allen, another of Arthur’s cousins, was charged in 1871 with the odd crime of stealing a sack of guano, which William denied. The allegedly stolen bag of guano was produced for the magistrate to see. Apparently the magistrate decided that the evidence was strong enough (no pun intended) to justify committing William for trial. There is no newspaper record of William’s trial, but the Criminal Registers for England and Wales, available on ancestry.co.uk, record a sentence of four months.

Arthur’s brother Alma Nice was the only one of Edward’s children to remain in Toppesfield all his life. Born in 1856, he witnessed the transformation of his village and the Essex countryside before passing away in 1924. Alma is an intriguing character. He never married, yet we get a sense that he was surrounded by friends. Although a wheelwright, he filled his life with the kind of cultural pursuits we unfairly attribute to the middle class alone.

It seems that Alma was a man well respected in the village: when in 1884 a ceremony was held to bid farewell to the curate of the parish, the Essex Standard specifically noted that Alma had attended.

He enjoyed singing, acting and dancing. The Chelmsford Chronicle records in 1883 that he sang at a “magic lantern entertainment” organised by Reverend Payne in the village’s National Schoolroom. At the 1886 Boxing Day concert Alma had to sing an encore of his first song and then was called up for a rendition of “The Roast Beef of Old England.” He was a leading member of the church choir, nominated to present a gift on behalf of the choir to the schoolmaster on his retirement in 1893.

Alma appeared at the National Schoolroom in a “capital entertainment” in December 1886. He sang the comic song ‘I can’t make up my mind.’ His sister Clara played the opening piece, a pianoforte solo, which the Chelmsford Chronicle recorded as being “well executed.” Others from the village sang and acted, the Band of Hope Drum and Fife Band played a selection of music and Reverend Payne exhibited a “transformation picture,” showing “first the effects of drink and afterwards of water.”

One year Alma helped organise an especially well remembered concert. The highlight was an operetta entitled “The artful dodgers” staring Alma in one of the title roles. The Essex Newsman records that “Mr. Lansdown and Mr. Nice kept things going right merrily, and the audience was convulsed with laughter from beginning to end. The climax came when the policeman (Mr. C. Hardy) endeavoured to take one of the dodgers into custody, the other in the meantime robbing the policeman.”

There are many other references to concerts and other entertainments that Alma organised and starred in. Clearly he enjoyed the performing arts as much or more as his work in the Wheelwright shop, but he was also a sportsman, a member of the illustrious Toppesfield Cricket Club. The Chelmsford Chronicle records many glorious games. Clearly Toppesfield was the team other villages strived to defeat.

Alma was named in a couple of newspaper stories for other reasons too.

In 1878 he was called as a witness in a court case resulting from the death of a farmhand. George Barker, a beer house-keeper, had been charged with permitting drunkenness on his premises. Now the magistrates at Heddingham Petty Session had to decide if the fatal injuries Robert Turbin suffered when his wagon rolled over and crushed him resulted from drunken driving or from hitching an ungelded “entire horse” to the same shaft as a mare in heat.

A number of witnesses testified that they saw Turbin enter Alma’s wheelwright shop and then leave and enter the beer house. Alma testified that Turbin enquired in the morning about some shafts he was repairing. The shafts weren’t ready so Turbin decided he would wait for them in the village. Turbin returned to the wheelwright shop with his friend Charles Barker, son of the beer house-keeper, at 3.00 PM, but the shafts were still not ready and wouldn’t be ready until the next day.

Robert Hardy testified that he met Turbin at the wheelwright shop on Turbin’s second visit. He, Turbin and Barker left together at 3.20 PM to return to the beer-house to share a pot of beer. Turbin only stayed ten minutes, leaving before the pot was finished. “He was not exactly drunk, but he was under the influence of drink”, so Robert told him to take care of himself, believing he wasn’t capable of handling the horses.

A witness testified that Turbin was definitely drunk - he couldn’t sit steady in the wagon - and another witness saw Turbin driving the horses and wagon, claiming he seemed to be “the worse for beer.”

Alma’s brother Harry Nice testified that at about 4.00 PM he heard someone call out “Whoa!” and heard a noise of chains rattling. Harry rushed out to the road to see Turbin crawling out from under the wagon. The horses had escaped their harnesses and were standing there watching him. Harry helped Turbin home. Turbin died later that evening.

The magistrates took some time to deliberate before finding George Barker guilty, fining him £5 plus costs.

Ten years later, in 1888, Alma was recognised as a hero when he rescued a boy who had fallen into the pond near the blacksmith’s shop. The boy had sunk three times before Alma reached him. Luckily a doctor was on the spot and was able to resuscitate the lad.

Through all these years Edward Nice, the patriarch of the family, quietly raised his children and saw them go on to have children of their own, and then watched them leave Toppesfield one by one for Chelmsford, London and destinations beyond.

Edward only came to the attention of the newspapers once, when the Chelmsford Chronicle recorded his passing in July 1897: “The Late Mr. E. Nice - On Saturday the remains of the late Mr. Edward Nice, wheelwright, were laid to rest in the churchyard. The deceased, who was 74 years of age, had been almost bedridden for two years. The service was impressively conducted by the Rector, the Rev. J.J. Baddeley, and many of the houses in the parish were represented at the graveside. The coffin was literally covered with magnificent wreaths.”

There’s a sad and ironic postscript to the story of the Nice family in local newspapers. I wrote above about Edward’s son Harry discovering the farmhand Robert Turbin in the wreckage of his overturned wagon and helping Turbin to his home, where he died. The Essex newspapers of July 27th 1907 all reported Harry’s death in Chelmsford when he was returning from delivering bread on his baker’s cart and lost control of the horse’s reins. When the horse bolted, the cart hit a kerb and overturned. Harry was thrown from the cart and pinned beneath it. A doctor pronounced him dead on the spot. He was just 46.

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!