As in 1882, the largest shopping area is Whetstone High Road, with several blocks of shops, including multiple stores, public houses, and offices, most of them modern. The rest of the parish is covered mainly by commuters’ semi-detached houses. Some of the Victorian and Edwardian terraces in Holly Park are decaying and others are divided into flats, but most are structurally sound. Friern Barnet Lane, bordered by Friary park and the golf course, is the least populous part; with grass verges, it still seems rural, despite the felling of trees in the churchyard and in front of the alms-houses.

 T F T Baker and C R Elrington (ed), A History of the County of Middlesex: Vol 6, Friern Barnet, Finchley, Hornsey with Highgate (1980)

Like many such opportunities, it came through ‘a friend of a friend’ who had inherited the house on the death of his grandmother. The boxy flat was a veritable time warp, complete with the original late 1920s bathroom and kitchen fittings, some of which would not look out of place in the pages of Period Homes today. Although there was no central heating (a definite disadvantage to the retro look), the living room had the original open fireplace and tiled hearth with mantelpiece. This ‘feature’ was very cosy in winter, but of course the grate needed cleaning and setting every evening before the room could feel even vaguely warm. However, despite the hardships – doing the washing in the bath certainly qualified as another – I loved my first proper grown-up home.

And one day, when I was out shopping along Whetstone High Road, I discovered a way into the countryside right on my doorstep which felt almost as magical as falling through the back of a dusty wardrobe into Narnia. This was Totteridge Lane. Thirty odd years ago it still felt like a rural backwater, and walking up to the hamlet of Totteridge and beyond was akin to slipping back in time to when London’s growth was stopped in its tracks by the green-belt regulations. The walk was further enhanced by the discovery of the Rising Sun pub at the Mill Hill end – and more surprisingly a return bus service from there to Arnos Grove via Whetstone, which enabled an easy ride home after a visit to the pub.

In the 1980s, The Rising Sun still functioned as a traditional pub, complete with original snug bar, which felt like the kind of place the characters of a Thomas Hardy novel would patronise (I was going through a Hardy phase then). The whole area, with its millponds and weatherboard cottages, commons and village church, fed into my fantasy about the southern English countryside, encouraged by my reading of Hardy and my father’s tales of life in Somerset during the evacuation. And a couple of times when life in London depressed me so much that I could not even bear to take the train to work, I phoned in sick and headed off to walk the fields and lanes of the Totteridge/Mill Hill green belt instead, allowing nature to restore me.

But my recent long hike along the lane for a pint at the Rising Sun (now a popular Italian restaurant with no snug bar!) was at the end of a day’s sojourn in the footprints of some ‘rogue’ ancestors who had ended up exchanging south London for north of the river. What I had not known in 1985 was that less than twenty years previously my grandfather’s older sister had also lived – and died – in Whetstone, a five minute walk away from my flat at Hobart Close. This is just one of the many coincidences which I have come across while researching my family history.

Rose – christened the enchanting Rosina Lilian – was named after her maternal aunt, Rosina Holton, and was the oldest daughter of Arthur and Elizabeth Skelton (née Holton). The five Holton sisters (the product of two different fathers) seem to have been close throughout their lives and beyond. Sometime after Elizabeth’s death in 1895, her two daughters, Rosina and Elizabeth junior, went to live with two of their maternal aunts as domestic servants, an arrangement that was no doubt beneficial to both parties. When the widower Arthur remarried the widow Harriet Pushman (née Wales) the following year, there were four extra children to take on board, and the adolescent Rose and Elizabeth were perhaps relieved to get away from the new family set-up. In any case, they had completed their compulsory schooling by then and would have needed to find work somewhere.

At least Rose and Elizabeth had attended school, however peripatetically. Their mother had had no formal education and had been unable to sign her marriage certificate in 1880, putting a cross instead. It may seem shocking today that no-one was even able or willing to teach her how to even write her own name. However, Elizabeth snr. and her contemporaries might have been equally surprised to learn that large numbers of future generations of young women would not even have basic needlework skills, or would be unable to skin a rabbit.

While Elizabeth jnr. went to stay with Aunt Louise in Camberwell, Rose ended up in Holly Park Road in Friern Barnet (then predominantly rural), to live with her Aunt Emma, who had married a Bedfordshire-born farm carter, George Kidman. The Kidmans had four children, and presumably Rose helped to take care of her younger cousins as well as carrying out her household chores. Possibly Rose had the better deal as Emma had a much smaller family than her older sister Louise (who had eleven children). 

Unsurprisingly, Rose eventually met a local boy, George Ryall (a plasterer), and married him in 1905 while expecting their first child, also setting up home in Holly Park Road, where she was to spend the best part of the rest of her long life. Sadly, her Aunt Emma never had the chance to attend the wedding as she was dead by 1902. However, one year later George Kidman remarried (a pattern that was repeated with all the Holton sisters’ marriages, apart from with Rose’s namesake, Rosina). But I was heartened to discover that Rose’s older brother Arthur and step-sister Harriet Pushman came up from Thornton Heath to be the witnesses. And in December of the same year, when Rose had already given birth to her first daughter, Nellie Rosina, she and George travelled to Thornton Heath to witness Arthur and Harriet’s own wedding.

Having never explored Friern Barnet when I lived in Whetsone, I was excited to be finally heading out to see where Rose and Emma had lived, and took the Picadilly line from Central London to Arnos Grove (a station I had sometimes used in my Whetstone days). At the turn of the century, Friern Barnet would still have had a village feel, despite the relatively new brick terraces which had sprung up (of which Holly Park Road was one) near to the railway station at New Southgate (Colney Hatch) on the Great Northern Line. However, today the area is very much part of the north London urban conglomeration and walking along Friern Barnet Road it was difficult to imagine how quiet it must have felt at the end of the 19^th century. Despite its evocative name and the fact that it was tucked away behind the main road, almost free of traffic, Holly Park Rd reminded me of its sister streets in south London. Here were the same Victorian terraces beloved of Arthur and Elizabeth, some of the houses now looking rather shabby and neglected (although several were obviously currently in various stages of gentrification).

But my disappointment soon turned to delight as I headed into Friern Barnet Lane towards Whetstone and the house in Church Crescent where Rose had died at the great age of 86. For on that bright spring morning I stumbled across a site that gladdened my soul as much as the early daffodils nodding at the side of the road: namely, the beautiful church of St James the Great. Now used by the Greek Orthodox Community, the church and surrounding churchyard is in a setting almost as rural as that of St Andrew’s Church in Totteridge Lane – a reminder of how Friern Barnet Lane might once have looked like before it was widened and developed in the 1920s.

What excited me in particular as I pushed  open the wooden gate and stepped between the yew trees which guarded the entrance to the churchyard, was the knowledge that this bucolic spot was where Rose’s Aunt Emma had been interred in 1902 – along with her little boy, who had died as an infant in 1892 (and was buried just two days before her sister Elizabeth gave birth to my grandfather, Sidney). Perhaps even more thrilling for a direct descendant like myself, it was also the final resting place of Francis Holton, Rose’s grandfather (and thus one of my own great-great -grandfathers).

When Francis Holton’s second wife died at Royal Terrace, Kennington Park, in 1887, from exhaustion and bronchitis (did that pesky oil of vitriol factory play a role in her demise?), he went to spend the last four years of his life at Holly Park Rd with his daughter Emma and her family. I have always been fascinated by Francis Holton, who was named after his father – a Westminster butcher, even though as a non-Skelton he is slightly out of my research orbit. Not only is he in possession of such an elegant-sounding name, but when his daughter Elizabeth was born in 1859 he listed his occupation as Labourer at Buckingham Palace. At that time the Holtons also lived in Westminster at 4 Belvoir Terrace, Vauxhall Bridge Rd. Surprisingly, the late Georgian houses in this very busy (and grimy) road are still standing, and are now listed buildings.

I have often wondered whether Francis was involved in putting in the new sewers in the palace, a move precipitated by ‘The Great Stink’ of 1858. On the death of his wife in 1887, he was described as a ‘Board of Works Labourer’. This organisation was set up in 1855 to provide London with the infrastructure badly needed to support its rapid growth, and was involved in constructing some 2100 km of sewage tunnels under the city, including Buckingham Palace. A year later, in 1888, it became officially known as the London County Council (LCC). However, in 1881, on Elizabeth’s marriage certificate (where she put an X in place of her name), his occupation is given as ‘porter’. So perhaps his involvement with the Metropolitan Board of Works was rather precarious in nature and these brief descriptions of his employment cannot readily be joined up to make a coherent history.

Sadly, Francis Holton’s grave and that of his daughter and baby grandson are no longer to be found amongst the decaying headstones, many of which have now succumbed to ivy and bramble vines, and it is doubtful whether any of their descendants past the subsequent generation even knew such graves existed. However, the topic of Victorian grave searches is one to which I will return in a future chapter where I will recount the discovery of a Skelton family plot in Nunhead Cemetery, the knowledge of which was hidden (for reasons which will soon be revealed) from Arthur snr. and his descendants.

But what of Rose, the eponymous heroine of this chapter? My aunt has always been under the impression that Rose was one of the last Skelton children, and had died relatively young. She once wrote that: Rose was the baby of the family and she suddenly started visiting us when your father and I were very small, bringing us expensive presents. Bob had a tricycle once, I had a china-faced doll. Before we got too used to these presents, she died quite young, it was said from blood poisoning. She was scratched by a rusty nail in a packet of cigarettes – they said!

My father also vaguely remembered an Aunt Rose as a rather glamorous woman in a fur coat who came to visit them with gifts. As he was born in 1928, this must have been in the 1930s, when Rose Ryall would have been in her 50s. One plausible explanation is that their Aunt Rose was actually bringing them the cast off toys of her own children (the last of whom was born in 1923). Perhaps to a child’s eye she appeared younger and more glamorous than her years – although this does not explain the apocryphal story of her rather gruesome death. Another explanation is that she was not their aunt at all, but a family friend named Rose who had been confused in their young minds with their namesake aunt.

Like the mystery of the doorstep foundling Nell, (see The Two Arthurs), I am prone to while away countless unproductive hours trying to get to the truth of the story. And that is one of the reasons why I have committed myself to this genealogy project. By pulling disparate threads together in order to create a coherent narrative, I hope to see connections and patterns that I might otherwise have missed. This is an approach I would recommend to anyone attempting to put meat on the bones of a skeleton family history. There is no point in waiting until all the questions have been neatly answered as that time will never come!

The Incidental Genealogist, May 2016