Category Archives: Stops Family

April is the Cruellest Month

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April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland (1922)

T S Eliot The Wasteland

April certainly feels like the cruellest month this year. It can be hard to appreciate the days lengthening and nature re-asserting itself after the long winter when we are unable to take advantage of the season in our customary manner. Yet, at a time when out of necessity our movement has become very much restricted, any green spaces we can still access will become even more precious to us in the following weeks.

For that reason, I would like to focus this month on the way that various gardens – both private and public – have shaped the lives of my London ancestors. From the story of the creation of two very different municipal parks (see A Tale of Two Parks) to my grandmother’s Edwardian childhood (see Portrait of my Grandmother as a Young Woman), and the presence of Crystal Palace in many of my south London ancestor’s lives (the poor and the wealthy), gardens have always been entwined with my family story to some degree.

kristallpalast_sydenham_1851_aussenCrystal Palace and grounds, Sydenham, c1854

This probably comes as no surprise, however, as the desire to have a small piece of land to call one’s own seems to be imbedded in the British psyche, whether one is much of a gardener or not. Notions of privacy and control over personal space play a pivotal role as do ideas of resurrecting some part of a lost arcadia. This desire seems to cut across all the social classes, illustrated by the notebooks collated by Charles Booth’s researchers when constructing Booth’s famous poverty maps. These jottings indicate that even in some of the most impoverished of neighbourhoods the residents still attempted to brighten up their streets with flowers in window boxes.

When describing a road in Kennington near to where my great-grandfather, Arthur Skelton, was raised, Booth’s assistant, George Herbert Duckworth, mentions that Flower boxes and windows are brightest in the poorer coster streets. He compares this with another street, slightly higher up the social scale, where there was not a flower at any window, deducing that It almost seems as though it were thought respectable not to have flowers. This is an interesting observation, which could possibly be attributed to the fact that in these residences there was more space for indoor plants, or that plants were grown at the rear of the house, out of sight. Perhaps flower boxes placed at the front of the house might have given those who were unsure about their social status the sense that they were advertising the absence of no other growing space.

Duckworth appeared to be particularly interested in all things horticultural as he often added descriptions of the plants and gardens he encountered on his research trips accompanied by the local policeman, thus giving us a vivid snapshot of late Victorian London. For example, in the description of another Kennington street he notes: China pots with overgrown ferns in front window. This allows the street to come alive for the modern reader in a way that surpasses descriptions of two-shilling weekly rents and numbers of factory labourers.

By the time Booth’s poverty maps were being created, the local green space, Kennington Park, previously Kennington Common and once the site of political gatherings and demonstrations, had been a formal, gated park for four decades. In 1858, after a false start, elaborate flower beds had been laid out in symmetrical patterns, a style which was once at the cutting-edge of mid-Victorian garden design and would soon be adopted elsewhere. For the local residents it was a unique chance to see large areas of flowering plants, and the Gardener’s Chronicle of the time mentioned a bordering of flowers as bright as the smoke and vapour from an adjoining vitriol factory (in photograph below) will let them be.

chartists

Kennington Park circa 1908Kennington Common, Chartist Rally, 1848* vs, Kennington Park, c1908

*Copyright, The Royal Collection

In her book How to be a Victorian, the writer and historian Ruth Goodman points out that not all plants could survive in the polluted London air, where chemicals mixed with precipitation to create an acid rain which poisoned the soil. As the time of Booth’s investigations coincided with the peak of the London smogs, the window boxes thus represent an act of faith by the families who had established them. Perhaps that is why they were more predominant in certain streets and neighbourhoods. Those who had little say in their economic conditions and cramped environments might have sought to exercise some sort of control over nature, which also gave them a sense of hope.

Goodman describes the growth of urban gardening in the mid-18th century as such: The 1830s to 1850s were the heyday of florist’s societies. Groups of mainly urban men, whose working lives were spent in small, home-based workshops as weavers or frame knitters, carpenters or nail makes, flowers became their passion. They raided new varieties, selected the strongest seeds and perfected their chosen flowers over years of patient, careful propagation and superb horticultural skill. The plants they grew were cultivated on tiny patches of ground around their homes and workshops, and in pots and containers which stood in yards and on windowsills.

Whenever I look at informal photographs of my ancestors, I find myself trying to glean the lost details of their day-to-day routines. The images act as a portal into the past, which although can be a limitation in terms of freezing one moment rather than other (see Those Ghostly Traces), does offer up some clues as to their daily lives. For that reason, I treasure the photographs of my grandmother’s family at 95 Denmark Road, Brixton, possibly taken by her older brother. Not only was this house my grandmother’s home for over three decades, but it was the place where she lost both her parents, met my grandfather, and gave birth to her three children, before the building succumbed to WW2 bombing raids.

Edith_Stops_at_95_Denmark_Road,_Camberwell (3)Edith Stops at 95, Denmark Road, c1910

In the picture above, it is the building itself and the small strip of garden in front of the house which intrigue me almost as much as the image of my young grandmother. I described my reaction to receiving this photograph (amongst others) from the grand-daughter of my grandmother’s brother in one of my earliest posts (see I Remember, I Remember) as such: For days afterwards I scrutinised every detail of the photographs, hoping that repeated viewings would reveal more. I became particularly obsessed with the image of the house at 95 Denmark Road. The squinty old building fascinated me almost as much as the sight of my grandmother standing at the gate.

My gaze was drawn to the blinds and the net curtains at the windows; the  plant on the window sill of the front room; a flower bed of what look like tulips in a tiny sad strip of garden; iron railings which were yet to be removed for a future war; a boot scraper in front of the rather forbidding-looking front door. I longed to see through the sash window on the ground floor to the room that lay behind the fussy nets. I imagined it to be dark and over-stuffed with furniture, shabby too. Perhaps a room they only used ‘for best’. And what is that shadowy object lurking just out of sight between the curtains? An aspidistra? A mahogany plant stand? Or Harriet sitting on the good chair, reading the newspaper?

In other photographs, we can see the back yard of their terraced mid-19th century house – basically a functional outdoor space, with space for some flower and vegetable beds. As no-one thought to photograph the back garden from the other side i.e. facing the back of the house, it is only these partial glimpses that we are afforded. However, I should imagine that by the time my grandfather became the head of the house, the garden would have become his undisputed territory, although with a henhouse to contend with as well as young children, this was most likely a purely practical project.

In fact, my aunt recalled that in the 1930s she and my father would dare each other to climb over the wall that separated their property from the neighbour’s and run around their immaculate garden under cover of darkness. Part of the excitement was the illicitness of the activity – but there was also the lure of entering a forbidden garden of sorts. And one which was given over wholly to beauty and pleasure. Of all the anecdotes my aunt has furnished me with, this one stands out in my mind as it seems to encapsulate the world of childhood in one secretive and daring act.

Stops Family in Back Garden of 95 Denmark RoadThe Stops Family in the back garden of 95, Denmark Rd, c1923

In later years, my grandfather would spend a great deal of time gardening, both at the family’s new post-war accommodation and in the gardens of his three children as they settled down and raised families of their own. In fact, our very own suburban garden in Scotland owes a debt to my London grandfather, not just in the way it was laid out, but in the advice he gave to my father over the years. As a child I remember seeing retired first world war veterans working in their gardens and allotments, some who had been gardening for years and building up a wealth of experience along the way. Many would have initially wanted to provide for their families (a strong instinct in my grandfather), as well as feel some sort of control over their own environment.

Garden At Bishop's GroveMy parents in my grandparents’ back garden in Hampton, April, 1963

Grandad Skelton in the back gardenGrandad Skelton in our back garden, Alloway, c1967

Although my own father was not yet seventeen when the war ended, and thus not involved in the conflict, he did his required period of national service and then stayed in the forces, spending many years overseas in the RAF. For the rest of his life he always said that having his own home and garden was something he would never take for granted. Simple things such as not sharing a bathroom or having his own bedroom seemed like a luxury after years of living in shared digs. And of course this would have been compounded by the fact that during the war the family left their home for a cramped and draughty farm cottage in East Coker (see East Coker), even though it was through his experiences of being evacuated to Somerset that my father grew to love the British countryside.

As a child I always used to laugh at the fact that in the summer evenings he would go out and walk around the garden, smoking the stub of a cigar (often on a toothpick) telling us he was just off to survey the estate, the dog padding at his heels. At the time I never really understood what all that surveying entailed, but of course all he probably wanted were some moments on his own to contemplate life quietly in the garden, taking pleasure from the things he’d planted and nurtured there, and perhaps planning future changes to the beds and borders.

Although the garden was relatively small (but much bigger than the yard in Denmark Road), we made use of the space to grow our own fruit and vegetables in a sort of kitchen garden which was separated from the recreational part by a trellis fence over which climbing roses were trained. Like most children I enjoyed cramming my face with illicit fruit and ate things that felt instinctively good, but at the time I had no idea if they would help or harm me. I chewed on whole peapods before the peas were properly ripe as I loved the juicy taste of the pods. (I did not know about mange tout at this stage in my life!) I ingested handfuls of elderberries (which my father used to make a particularly awful wine) before thinking I was going to die and then lying down on my bed awaiting my grisly end, too scared to tell my parents I might have eaten poisonous berries. I sucked the juice out of crab apples and threw the sour flesh away – until the day I bit down on a wasp. And the blackcurrants that were earmarked for our favourite jam were scoffed in great quantities by myself and friends, out of sight behind the trellis.

One of the wonders of going to London to visit our family was to see the amazing things they could grow in their gardens on account of the warmer, drier weather. Their vegetable gardens felt like jungles compared to ours; although to be fair, the fact that our back garden was often in partial shade was a disadvantage. Yet we clung to the British tradition of hiding the kitchen garden away from prying eyes, meaning that our sunny front garden was mostly underused (despite the fact that it was set back from the road in a dip), apart from the times when my mother sat sewing in the porch on warm spring  afternoons.

In the front garden of 33 Doonholm RoadIn the sunny front garden of our house in Alloway, c1968

Step at Doonholm RoadSteps down from the road to the front garden in the ‘dip’, Alloway, c1965

But for most of my ancestors such an expanse of front garden would have seemed like a luxury not to be wasted on decoration. Either they possessed the narrow strip gardens illustrated by the Denmark Road photograph, or their terraces were flush again the pavement. As backyards were mostly functional, then trips to local municipal parks, such as Kennington Park, would have been important fixtures of summer Sunday outings. When we visited our grandparents in West London (where they moved after the war), most of the excursions we undertook with them involved going to nearby parks and gardens, such as the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew or Bushy Park – always in Sunday best, of course!

At Kew with Grandma SkeltonAt Kew Gardens with Grandma Skelton, c1971

At present when we cannot access many of the local parks and gardens that we love, we could do worse than to take inspiration from those Victorian gardeners who planted up pots and other containers to brighten up their surroundings. Even if the nurseries and garden centres have closed their doors, as long as we have access to some sort of growing media, we can propagate plants through a wide variety of methods and share seeds, cuttings, bulbs etc. with friends and neighbours, just as many of our ancestors would have once done through financial necessity. A window box or an indoor windowsill can still offer up the pleasure of nurturing life, and by watching it grow we can gain hope and strength for the upcoming weeks.

Happy Easter

Wishing everyone a happy and healthy Easter!

The Incidental Genealogist, April 2020

Portrait of my Grandmother in Later Life

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Family photography can operate at this junction between personal memory and social history, between public myth and personal unconscious. Our memory is never fully ‘ours’, nor are the pictures ever unmediated representations of our past. Looking at them we both construct a fantastic past and set out on a detective trail to find other versions of a ‘real’ one.

Jo Spence and Patricia Holland, Family Snaps: The Meanings of Domestic Photography, (1991)

P1050391 (2)With my grandmother, Edith Skelton, on the Arran ferry, c1967

It is fair to say that neither my grandmother nor I seem to be particularly photogenic when we were snapped together on family outings in the 60s and early 70s. My grandmother had at least the excuse of age, as photographs of her as a young woman show her to look very different (see Portrait of my Grandmother as a Young Woman). However, it was the ‘lost’ pictures of her as an Edwardian child that have made the biggest impression on me, and I very much wish I could have been privy to them as a child myself.

For most children, it is impossible to imagine their grandparents as anything other than old. And at a time when very few photographs were available of elderly relatives in their youth, it required an imaginative feat to picture the average pensioner as a child. This task was made more difficult by various ‘accoutrements of aging’, such as false teeth, grey hair, outdated clothes and ugly glasses, which were once more prevalent than today. But was the generational gulf really wider then, or is the belief that the current crop of retirees are more youthful than previously just an inevitable part of one’s own aging? If I met my grandparents today, frozen at ‘peak grandparenthood’ in their seventies, would I necessarily think them any older in body and spirit than their modern-day counterparts?

One thing about my grandmother that I may have mentioned before – as it fascinated me as a child – was the fact she retained her own teeth all her life, unlike all my other elderly relatives. Although her teeth were long and yellow (like a horse), they somehow suited her large face and lively grin*. And of course that meant there was never that horrible moment when you first saw a grandparent sans teeth, and wondered what had caused their face to crumple into one which resembled an unsavoury character from a particularly scary fairy tale.

* Years later, when I scrutinised photos of my Scottish grandmother as a young woman, I noticed that her smile had once been so different. It was only after my mother explained that her ‘one size fits all’ set of dentures, shockingly given to her in her 40s at the birth of the NHS to prevent future dental problems, had robbed her of her natural wide smile. But as a child I thought those funny regular too-white false teeth in old age was a given!

In fact, my English grandmother was unlike my Scottish grandmother in many ways, not least in her appearance. The age gap of almost a decade, made Grandma Skelton seem much older. She was never as fashionably dressed as my Scottish grandmother, who had been a dressmaker in her youth (having undertaken an apprenticeship), and made all her own clothes – including the mother-of-the-bride outfit, below. And while my McKay grandmother was slim and neat with short permed hair, the elderly Edith still had her unruly wavy hair tied back in a bun, strands often falling over her face (possibly why she wore hats so much). She was heavier and sweatier and ‘harumphed’ a great deal more. And my mother always used to say that the two couples were the wrong way round: Edie was the plump one, while Sidney was small and wiry – the exact opposite of my Scottish grandparents.

P1040641 (2)My parents’ wedding in March 1963 – with my grandparents ‘interchanged’

While we saw our McKay grandparents several times a year, travelling to London to visit the Skelton grandparents was considered to be quite a palaver. Not only did we all have to go down together as a family, but there was the hassle of how to get there. Over the years we tried different ways (flying, driving, the overnight bus) and all were considered stressful by my parents, who preferred to holiday at home and day-trip locally.

In addition, my grandparents’ retirement flat was relatively compact. So the four of us had to sleep in the double bedroom (kids on camp beds either side of our parents), while my grandparents had to use the pull-out sofa bed in the living room. Every morning Grandma would wake us all as she shuffled into the room in her pink house slippers, carrying a taper to light the boiler, which was housed in a cupboard in the corner, leaving a strong smell of gas in the room. (This was because she did not trust it to be left on overnight). Near to the boiler cupboard was Grandma’s old-fashioned dressing table, on which  was a collection of photographs of her three grown-up children. It always delighted me to see one of my father in his RAF uniform, sporting a rather raffish moustache, and smoking a cigarette something he’d given up – along with his MG Midget – on becoming a father. He always seemed very sophisticated in this photograph and not like the man we only knew as ‘Daddy’.

There was also a whimsical collection of tiny wooden animals which had once belonged to my father, and I used to put them into matchboxes and take them out with me on our day trips into London. Some I even took home to Scotland with me because I could not bear to leave them behind. Sadly, they have all disappeared over the years (a couple were lost in Bushy Park, which caused me no end of panic at the time) and I now only have one remaining. However, it was only recently that my mother told me this was a collection my father had started in his 20s, and not one from his boyhood at all. And of course this all makes perfect sense as the many moves the family undertook over the years, including the war-time evacuations, meant that there were very little possessions from the pre-war era (see Of Lost Toys and Mothers), and perhaps why my father always treasured the fairy tale book he’d received from his first primary school for good work and conduct in 1936.

P1070486 (2)The last remaining wooden animal from my father’s collection

After my grandmother and the children returned from East Coker in 1945, the family were reunited and temporarily housed in the top rooms of a multi-occupancy house in Teddington, West London, while waiting to be rehoused. (Presumably my grandfather had found work as a tram conductor in the area, otherwise it would have been a long commute to the Camberwell depot). And two years later they finally moved round the corner into a three-bedroomed semi-detached council house at Bishops Grove, where they were to remain for over twenty years, near to their newly married daughter and her growing family. My father was away in the Air Force by then, but this was his base in his vacation time, and thus he remained at the address on the electoral roll throughout the 1950s until suddenly he disappears in 1959 – the year he was accepted for air traffic control training, moved to Scotland, and met my mother. Shortly after this, my uncle married his local girlfriend, and just like my aunt and her husband had done a decade previously, the young couple lived with my grandparents while saving for a place of their own.

P1050416 (2)Edith with her new Scottish daughter-in-law, Bishops Grove, 1963

As the baby of the family, my uncle was quite content to stay with his parents a little while longer, whereas my father had wanted to get away from – in his eyes – rather suffocating mother, who he always felt was watching him closely. Even at a young age, I sensed that my father was often exasperated with his mother: at her needless fussing, her endless searches for public toilets, her wish to sit down and have ‘a nice cup of tea’. In addition, she became slightly deaf in her old age and everyone had to get used to repeating things to her.

For me, it was often difficult to understand her London accent in any case – it sounded like something from an Ealing comedy to my ears – and I always dreaded not knowing what she was saying to me. We had got used to our father’s way of speaking, which had been smoothed by his years as a boy in the west country and his time in the forces, not to mention his years in Scotland, but our Skelton grandparents seemed to speak like characters out of a film about the Blitz. Sometimes I found this quite strange, especially as they often commented on our accents, and I used to feel there was an insurmountable gap between us. And yet it was exciting too, to have these exotic-sounding grandparents who oozed what I felt was the spirit of Cockney London every time they opened their mouths.

Looking back I have no idea now what we all talked about when we tried to understand one another. Possibly my grandparents asked us about school and the sights we’d visited in London when the four of us returned to their flat in the evening. Other days we all went out together to nearby locations, such as Kew Gardens or Bushy Park (places where there were public toilets and cafes). Grandma always wore a hat, whatever the weather, and did not make much concession to summer. For my father, who was a bit of a free spirit, these days out with young children and elderly parents were possibly tedious, but I remember that it always seemed exciting to go out en famille like that, and even more so when we went to visit our cousins (as we had none on the maternal side of the family). However, the age gap with our older cousins meant that we did not see so much of them so it was mainly the two children of my father’s younger brother we spent time with (and who I still visit today).

P1040615 (2)A rare family gathering (and a rare hatless moment for my grandmother)

However, I was always aware of my grandparents closer bond with their English grandchildren, who they saw on a regular basis, and who called them ‘Nan’ and ‘Grandpa’. Possibly it would have been easiest all round if we’d just adopted this name for our paternal grandparents, too. Having to call them Grandma and Grandad Skelton to distinguish them from our Scottish grandparents (who did not need the extra appellation) always felt like marking them out as second-class grandparents, which in a sense they were. And had it not been for our collection of family photographs, I would not even have known that they had come up to Scotland to visit us several times before they got too old to make the long journey after 1970. As hard as I try, I have no recollection of any of their annual summer visits!

P1040718 (2)Grandma Skelton dressed for a summer’s picnic, Ayrshire, c1970

It is only now, through re-viewing these old family photographs, that I can see how Edith’s children (and their children) have inherited some of her physical characteristics, including her slight double chin and thick, wayward hair. Whenever I’m with my Skelton-born cousins, I’m always surprised (and delighted) at how they walk with her flat-footed gait, and sometimes a quizzical look will flit over their faces which reminds me of my grandmother. And as we are all moving closer to the age our grandparents once were when we were young, these similarities have become even more apparent.

p1070482 (2)Edie’s own three children in middle age (1980s)

P1070488 (2)Studio portrait of my father and his sister, c1932

The abiding impression I have of my grandmother in her later life was the continuing importance of home and family. This is best illustrated by the fact that she moved to East Coker in September 1940 to be near to my aunt (who was evacuated there with Camberwell Girls School), taking her two younger sons with her (see East Coker). Both her boys had initially been billeted in separate accommodation at the outbreak of war, my uncle to Brighton (he was only four!) and my father to Leatherhead with Gipsy Hill Junior School. There he lived with a large prominent Russian-American Mormon family who had known Joseph Kennedy when he had lived in the area, and my father recalled being given the future President Kennedy’s cast-off bicycle to ride.

When the boys returned to London during the period known as the ‘phoney war’, my grandmother no doubt decided that she did not want the three of them to be split up again. My aunt later told me that her parents kept the news from her that the brothers were back at home in case she wanted to return, too. However, I have the feeling that, as a teenager, my aunt was possibly enjoying her freedom in East Coker where there was a lively social life and many opportunities for interaction with the local youth. And of course it was here where my aunt eventually met her future husband.

Although my grandmother had given up her work as a telephonist (both her brothers had worked as telegraph clerks before the outbreak of WW1) on her marriage in 1924, like most of the population she undertook wartime tasks in East Coker. After a couple of false starts (a distressing billet where my grandmother was bullied by the woman of the house who wanted her to cook and clean for them all), the family found themselves in a farm cottage belonging to Burton Farm. Here the older Skeltons helped out the farmer Bill Dunning and his family, and my grandmother undertook cleaning work. My grandfather – on reserved occupation in London – came to visit occasionally, but it must have been strange for the three children not to have had their father in their lives for five years, a long time for a child.

As the grown-up children all came back at various times to the family’s new home in West London after the war, Edie’s role as a mother and housewife never seemed to stop and simply segued into that of full-time grandparent. In the 1950s she regularly helped out my aunt with her three ‘steps-and-stairs’, then in the 1960s she helped bring up my uncle’s young children when he was widowed untimely. And all the while she continued to cook her legendary roast dinners with Yorkshire puddings so high they were fabled to have been stuck in the oven on occasion.

My grandmother also continued to see her two beloved brothers and their families, who had moved out of  London during the war, spending time with Fred and his wife in Exeter when he was very ill at the end of his life. Both Tom and Fred died relatively young, but Edith continued to stay in touch with some of their children, following their achievements with pride. And this was what I believe her final role was: to support her friends and family, and to help her children to attain their educational goals. Like many women at that time, it seems to have been enough for her to give the next generation wings to fly. She created a safe base from which they could launch themselves into the world, and at the same time was satisfied with this.

Stops (2)Edith with her first-born Stops nephew and niece, Demark Rd c1923

We can never know how much of our ancestors’ life decisions were based on personality or circumstances, but perhaps – just sometimes – there are those who find that both of these come together by happenstance. There was the free spirit who revelled in the cultural changes of the 1960s; the studious type who was lucky to be born in the time of scholarships and university grants; the entrepreneurial engineer who lived during a period of rapid industrial progress. Perhaps my grandmother found that she enjoyed the role that was thrust upon her; perhaps she had no choice. But I think in her own way she lived her life to the full, while still giving something back to society. And in the end, this is really all that each of us can hope for. 

The Incidental Genealogist, March 2019

Portrait of my Grandmother as a Young Woman

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During the 1910s, women’s fashion favoured a more natural body shape and a decline in fussy ornamentation – an altogether less cluttered line. Ancestors can look fairly plain in photographs of this period, when wearing the popular blouse and skirt combination that formed the basis of the female wardrobe. Typically, a white or coloured blouse with a high collar, or slightly lower neckline with a rounded collar, was teamed with a plain tailored skirt, the skirt rather narrow or moderate in shape and sometimes featuring ornamental buttons.

Jayne Shrimpton,Tracing Your Ancestors Through Family Photographs, (2014)

edith at 18My paternal grandmother, Edith Matilda Stops, at age 18 in 1916

My London grandmother, Edith Matilda Skelton (née Stops), died on the 31st March 1976, two years into her short widowhood. She was found at her ground floor flat in Hampton, ensconced in her favourite comfy chair, a book on her lap, her weak heart having suddenly given out after 78 years. As a child, I had thought this a most normal-sounding death, but of course I now know better. When I think about the horrific-sounding demise of my Edwardian  actor/manager ancestor Herbert Sleath-Skelton in Holloway Asylum (see Herbert Sleath: His Decline and Fall), or that of his father’s junior business partner, George Schofield – who was crushed under a tube train at Warren Street Station towards the end of his life – then I know that my grandmother was one of the lucky ones.

The informant of my grandmother’s death was my fifty-year-old aunt, who lived nearby, and visited her mother regularly. She had been alerted by a neighbour who’d noticed from the communal garden that my grandmother had been sitting at the window in her chair all day, something which was very unlike her. In fact, earlier that morning she’d hung out a wash, then brought it inside, folding it in preparation for an ironing which would never happen. All those details I know as they were related to my parents in a phone call later that same day, no doubt to impress upon them that the death had been unexpected and that my grandmother had not suffered it any way. As it was, we’d only just had a telephone put in at our home – partly because when my grandfather died two years earlier, the family living next to us were contacted first. (We were not particularly close to them, so that probably was a slightly awkward scenario for all concerned).

glenmill.jpgThe flats at Glenmill, Hampton, with the communal gardens

It must have been that ugly grey phone, bolted high up the wall next to the hall mirror, which delivered the bad news about our grandmother to our house. I remember being  told very little about the event, at the time, and my father set off down to London for a slightly tense meeting with his siblings (there being some sort of friction between my aunt and uncle, as is often the case after the death of a parent). A few days later he came back with a rather kitschy swan vase for me – one of several ornaments my grandmother had out on display during my childhood. But I never felt as if it contained the essence of her, and sadly I lost it in one of my many moves over the years.

grandma's swanAn almost identical swan vase to my grandmother’s

What I really wanted (had I been asked) was the funny green plastic cup that I was told was actually called a beaker, and which could magically hold hot tea without melting. It had a strange but comforting smell – especially if you bit softly into the rim. When we finally arrived from Scotland at our grandparents’ house off the overnight bus (via the newly-built M1), all of us were exhausted and out of sorts, and I was always glad to be given sweet tea in that cup.

There were, however, very few items my grandparents had in their retirement flat which had accompanied them throughout their married life. This does not surprise me as they had the misfortune to be born in the 1890s, which would see them both involved (in their own way) in two world wars and all the disruption that entailed. And as regular readers may recall, when my grandmother and the three children all ended up being evacuated to Somerset to escape the Blitz, many of their possessions, including my father’s and my aunt’s favourite toys, were misplaced (see Of Lost Toys and Mothers).

However, recently I was pleased to discover that one of my cousins (with whom I share a birth year) had inherited my grandmother’s ‘wedding teapot’ through her father. She’d specifically asked for the item as it was a precious link to both her father and the beloved grandmother who had helped to look after her and her brother  when – in an uncanny mirroring of our paternal grandfather’s childhood experience – they had been left motherless at a very young age.

GRANDMAS TEAPOT.JPGMy grandmother’s silver-plated ‘wedding teapot’

As previously mentioned (see I Remember, I Remember), the one house that could have been described as the Stops-Skelton family home was 95 Denmark Road in Brixton*, where my grandmother lived from an early age until she turned forty. Not only did she meet my grandfather there when he came to lodge with her widowed mother, Harriett Stops, in 1922 (after serving in WW1), but all her three children were born in the house, and Harriett lived out her last years with the family, dying of heart disease in 1930, at the age of 73 at the local Lambeth Hospital (where her husband, Thomas Stops, had died of TB in 1906). Despite the  whole family being delighted to eventually be able to move to a modern cottage-style council house in West Norwood which had both electricity and an indoor toilet, I expect there must have been some degree of sadness when they closed the heavy door of number 95 behind them for the last time in 1938.    

*Lambeth Archives holds the details for this house, and I was fascinated to learn that it had been built on the site of gardens and orchards in the 1840s during a speculative building boom in the area. Thereupon the house changed hands several times, but always being used for rental income of up to £50 a year. It had been sold initially for £100 with £6 annum ground rents (on an 80-year lease), rising to £175 (possibly more), before it was reduced to £100 again by the 1930s. However, my grandfather’s brother (a builder) warned him not to buy it when he had the chance, which was a wise move given that the house was hit by a bomb shortly before it could celebrate its centenary.

denmark roadMy grandmother outside 95 Denmark Rd, Brixton, c1910

When I was a child, my grandmother always came across to me as a very motherly type, so it is hard for me to imagine her before her marriage as an independent young woman with a career as a telephonist at the central telephone exchange. That was in the early days of phone use, when calls had to be put through manually (something I can still just remember before STD or subscriber trunk dialling came into nationwide effect). She took up this job at the outbreak of WW1 and remained in it up until her marriage to my grandfather, Sidney Skelton, in 1924. In the photograph (below) of my grandmother with her mother and brother Tom, a telegraph clerk, taken in 1916, just before he went off to war, she appears very confident and grown-up in her smart but unfussy outfit – very different from the shy-looking little girl she seemed to be a decade earlier, in the image entitled ‘After Father Died’ (shown further below).

thomas_and_edith_with_mother_harriett_'before_going_to_the_war' (2)Edie with Tom and Harriett, ‘Before Going to War’ c1916

tom_fred_and_edith_with_mother_1909_taken_soon_after_father_died-3Edie with Tom, Fred and Harriett, ‘After Father Died’, c1906

From examining all the photographs of my grandmother in her youth, I have the sense she was once quite an active person, as there often appears to be an aura of restrained movement about her. In one particular image of her mother Harriett sitting in a chair in the back garden in Denmark Road, it is just possible to make out what looks like Edie (and the tail of a cat?) moving about behind her. However, as this was believed to be taken in 1923, a year before Edie’s marriage, it may have been another young female friend or relative.

It is strange feeling to think that this was also the same backyard* my father played in as a child, and which over the years contained a coal house, dustbin, outside toilet, dog kennel and henhouse. Despite all those multiple uses of what would not have been a particularly large space to begin with, it does even look as if there was the semblance of a garden as well.     

*As a child I found it odd  that my father called our suburban back garden a ‘back yard’, despite the fact I kept reminding him that, as it was covered in grass and had flowers and vegetables, it was technically a garden. For years I thought he’d picked up the expression from Americans he’d known, but of course it was only later I realised that a back yard really was what most old Victorian terraces had!

harriett june 23 Harriett Stops (née Burnell) in the back yard of 95 Denmark Road, June 1923

My grandparents’ wedding ceremony took place on Saturday 25th October 1924 at the parish church of St Matthews, in Brixton. Despite the fact that the following week would be the infamous  general election of 1924 (and the 3rd in two years), in which ex-prime minister  Stanley Baldwin* would be re-elected in a landslide win for the conservatives – the newly-married Edith was still not allowed to vote. She had to wait until 1928 (when ironically she turned thirty in any case) before the law changed to give all woman the same voting rights as men, who had been given the franchise in 1918 at age twenty-one (along with women over thirty, on conditions related to their properties or those of their husbands) under the 1918 Representation of the People Act.

I had always thought this age restriction was just due to some outdated notion that women were deemed to be more politically immature, but I have since discovered this it was created to redress the imbalance in the population caused by the loss of male voters during the Great War. By adjusting the voting age in such a way, it was reasoned that there would be more equal numbers of men and women.

*As surprising as it may seem, there is a vague family connection (through marriage) to Stanley Baldwin in the wealthy ‘other’ Skelton family, that readers may recall (see The Kipling Connection or Not So Great Expectations).

marriage_edith_stops-sidney_skelton (2)Skelton-Stops Wedding in Brixton, Saturday, 25th October, 1924

Edith must have been pleased to have Tom and Fred there beside her  on her ‘big day’, as both her older brothers had been active in the Great War, leaving her at home to lend support to Harriett while they were away. Due to this (the fear that she might lose them), and the strong bonds they created among them when they were all left fatherless at a relatively young age, my grandmother was to remain devoted to her brothers all her life. (This was lucky for me, as the only reason I have most of these photographs is because of Tom’s granddaughter, who I discovered on a genealogy website a few years ago).

As my own quest is centred mainly on the Skelton family, I have kept research into the Stops family to a minimum, even though, from a genetic point of view this is quite illogical. But at every new pairing there are more family history alleys one could travel down, and keeping my search to the Skeltons simplifies things, giving me more of a goal-orientated feel. If I were to start to investigate the Stops in any detail, I feel I would have to focus equally on the Burnells (Harriet’s family), then divide those into two branches, and so on*. I did, however, do this superficially for fun one day, and discovered that the first wife of Harriett Burnell’s brother, George, was called Matilda – and their little girl (who would go on to be called Daisy Matilda) was listed in the 1891 census as Not Named 4 ½ hours old! Was this the source of my grandmother’s middle name? As it turned out, the two cousins (Daisy and Edie) would become firm friends over the years, and my aunt recalled meeting Daisy as a child when she’d already left her native Somerset to take up a job in London as a waitress  at Selfridges .    

*I have sometimes been rather horrified to see huge sprouting family trees like ancient oaks where too many relatives seem to dilute the information – although I’m aware that ancestor-gathering does seem to be the aim of some researchers.

But to return to the Stops family. My grandmother’s father, Thomas Stops was a trained wheelwright/blacksmith, born in 1853 in Hackney, the middle son of another wheelwright (William Stops) from Wendover in Buckinghamshire. While these jobs sound very much like rural professions to our modern ears, there would most likely have actually been more of such work in the capital due to the number of horse-drawn vehicles on the streets. Despite this, William Stops was never able to make much money from his trade, and the growing family moved to different accommodation in East London on a regular basis. At one point they were living in Tower Hamlets at Pleasant Place, which sounded anything but pleasant if a contemporary description of the street by a physician investigating the sanitary conditions of London is to be believed.

It is worth quoting the extract in full, taken from the book Sanitary Ramblings being Sketches and Illustrations of Bethnal Green: A type of the condition of the metropolis and other large towns by Hector Gavin MD FRCSE (1848), due to the light it sheds on the plight of the insecure working class in the middle of the nineteenth century: This central square (consisting of Pleasant-row and Pleasant-place) is made up of swine-pens and yards in which dung-heaps are piled; in it are the privies of the northern half of the row, forming the south of the square. Immediately facing Pleasant-row is a ditch, filled with slimy mud and putrefying filth, which extends for 100 feet. The space between Pleasant-row and the central square is, beyond description, filthy; dung heaps and putrefying garbage, refuse, and manure, fill up the horrid place, which is covered with slimy foetid mud. The eastern end has likewise its horrid filthy foetid gutter reeking with pestilential effluvia; the southern alley is likewise abominably filthy: there the same slime and mud overspreads the broken up bouldered path; and there, the same most disgusting odours are given off, which are common to this area of putrescence. I do not think that in all my journeying through the degraded haunts of wretched poverty in this poor parish I have found a scene so distressing.

The houses in Pleasant-place are chiefly two-roomed and let at 3s. 6d. a week, but some of the two-roomed and all the three-roomed houses let at 5s. a week. I entered one of these houses on the southern side, and found that every individual in a family of seven had been attacked with fever, and that a daughter, aged 22, who had been convalescent eight weeks, on her return from the country to her miserable home, died of a relapse in two days. The body was retained in the house, because no means could be found to raise the money necessary to bury it, and was then lying in its coffin. The privy of this house is close to it, and is full and overflowing, covering the yard with its putrescent filth; the stench was perfectly unendurable; the house itself was most shockingly dirty. 3s. a week were paid for this den of pestilence, while the husband and wife together, by working night and day, could only earn 15s. a week. To permit a continuance of the state of things I saw would be, as it were, voluntarily to tolerate the elimination of a fatal poison to be sucked in at every breath of the occupants, who, this condemned to death, perish not by the momentary pangs of official strangulation, but by the more miserable death of loathsome typhus. How lost to all sense of charity and brotherly love, how forgetful of the value of human life, are those who apathetically survey such sad scenes of wretched misery.

So William Stops had left the countryside to better himself in the capital and it had come to this? It is ironic to note that at the same time as William was struggling in the East End, living at the very unpleasant-sounding Pleasant Place, his father Joseph Stops, was working as an agricultural labourer at Paradise Water Mill* (and maltings) in the village of Wendover, in Buckinghamshire, employed by the miller Eizabeth Hoare (whose sisters ran a private boarding school for young ladies in the 1840s and 50s), while his wife (William’s mother) took on the role of washerwoman.  

*Paradise House is now a grade 2 listed building and an extremely attractive private dwelling today, described in the town guide as being an 18th century construction which incorporates a much older one.

Despite the ‘paradise’ name, it is debatable whether life in the countryside was any easier than in the London ‘slums’. While places like Wendover are now highly desirable locations, particularly if in commuting distance to the capital (as Wendover is today), increasing industrialisation and threats from globalisation meant that the old rural trades, such as the lace making trade in Wendover, were now dying out. And even though living conditions in the capital were less than ideal, there was no rural idyll in the countryside either, with agricultural labourers earning a pittance for insecure work and living in poor quality housing.

However, it was often the next generation that was able to build on the risks their parents had taken through movement and migration. And so it was that when Thomas Stops married the Somerset-born domestic servant, Harriett Burnell, in 1887, after an eight-year stint as a soldier with the Royal Artillery, they were able to rent a terraced house on a new estate at Sands End in Fulham. It was there, at number 61 Cranbury Road, where several years later they had their three children: Thomas William Burnell (Tom) in 1893; Frederick Arthur James (Fred) in 1895; Edith Matilda (Edie) in 1898 (when Harriett was 41).

A few years ago I went to see the house, expecting an ordinary Victorian terrace. I was rather surprised to see that number 61 had been merged with 61a next door to create a large five-bedroomed home now named ‘Lavender House’, which has been featured in several prominent glossy magazines (see article here). Currently worth about three million pounds, it is a far cry from the old Cranbury Road houses of the 1970s, a time when  the area had become slightly run down, and it was possible to buy a period property for around three thousand pounds.

lavender house

lavender house gardenLavender House, Cranbury Road, Fulham, today (front and back)

And perhaps here – where it all began – is a fitting place to end the first part of our story. The Stops family left Fulham for Denmark Road in south London in the early 1900s and shortly after that Thomas died of tuberculosis, leaving Harriett to bring up the children alone, taking in a series of lodgers to help pay her way (one of whom would become my grandfather). Unfortunately, it is impossible to know why the family moved to the other side of London as the only connection they had with the area was the fact that Harriett had worked as a domestic servant for a family in Camberwell when she arrived from her native Highbridge in Somerset.

However, I have in my possession (courtesy of my aunt) a copy of a wonderful cabinet portrait entitled ‘Edie with Dog’, which was possibly taken by one of those itinerant photographers who called from house to house, most likely when the family still lived in Fulham. I’m not sure if the dog was the family pet, but it is certainly the kind which was popular at the time, and might instead have belonged to a friend or relative. Edie looks like she’s wearing her best Sunday bonnet and white dress. So was it a special occasion, or had she been dressed up especially for the photograph?

The background (a suburban garden fence supporting hollyhocks and climbers) makes me believe this photograph was taken in the garden of 61 Cranbury Road, shortly before the family left the area. Although the copy is of poor quality, I still find the composition exquisite. There is the angle of Edie’s head as she gazes at the unseen photographer. The nonchalant way she is holding the lead of that tiny dog. The slightly wild vegetation which frames her, suggesting a ramshackle garden that would be enchanting to a child.

Even the faded sepia copy lends the image an ethereal quality, making Edie appear like an Edwardian ghost child. As a child myself, I would have loved to have reached back through time and played with this little girl from another age in her wild back garden. Yet when my grandmother was still alive, I could never really have imagined her as anything other than lumpen and yellow-toothed. And I find that impossibly sad.

p1070485 (2)‘Edie with Dog’, c1903

To be continued next month . . .

The Incidental Genealogist, February 2019