My Ancestors

Ashsted, Birmingham
January 1897

Dear Children,

I take the pleasure of sending you a few lines to congratulate you on your wedding and wish you much happiness … if you would be happy you must endeavour to make each other happy and this must be done by making home the happiest place in the world and each others company the best … it is no use one gathering and the other scattering if you are to get on you must both pull one way … no doubt you will have your troubles and trials but the best way to meet them will be by making the best use of your present opportunities … and try to provide against a raining day … I dare say you will say it is Dads old chat but if you will carry out Dads advice you will bless the day that you had a Dad to give you good advice.

Yours aff. Father Mother (P & J ALLEN)

Philip and Sarah ALLEN (nee PYNOR), my great grandparents, had married on Boxing Day 1896. Over the next three a half years the couple endured many ‘raining days’.

Within a year of their marriage Philip had thrown away his career on the railways. First he was suspended (‘damage to stop block and wagons thro’ making two violent shunts’), then cautioned (‘causing two wagons to leave the rails … thro’ inattention’) and finally dismissed (‘absenting from duty without leave’).

Philip didn’t seem to have taken much heed of his dad’s advice about making home ‘the happiest place in the world’. Early in the second year of their marriage, Ada, their first child (and my grandmother) was born, That summer Sarah’s dad died aged just fifty-four. Sarah’s mum was living just round the corner, when Philip ended up before a magistrate for slapping her. According to the newspaper, he came home drunk; she turned him out; and then he slapped her. She dropped the charges, but it would still have cost him at least a day’s wages in costs – by that time Philip was working as a carter, delivering goods with a horse and cart. Six weeks later their second child George was born.

And then, two weeks after that, on a very rainy day – 21 June 1900 – Sarah was admitted to Lichfield County Lunatic Asylum, ‘laughing and singing and weeping’. At the time of her admission Sarah weighed just eight stone. She was five feet five inches tall, her appetite was poor and her bowels were described as ‘very active’. She had two faint bruises on each arm, nits in her hair, a wild dishevelled appearance and was talking volubly and very incoherently, recognising strangers as life-long friends and misnaming people. Her patient notes go on to say that she’d been exhibiting these symptoms for a week and that the causes were both hereditary and down to recent childbirth.

One week later she was still, ‘requiring a nurse constantly beside her’. But one month later, ‘her bodily condition is slightly better’. Perhaps that was down to the hearty one meal a day, supplemented by bread and butter for breakfast and bread and butter for supper and a pint of cocoa – nine parts water to one part milk. Her mind was ‘still irrational and much impaired’, and even after seven months she was, ‘still uncertain’.

And then, almost one year to the day after her admission, Dr Farquharson signed her discharge papers and she returned home. It turns out that Dr Farquharson might have had other things on his mind because it appears that one week before my great grandmother’s discharge he’d accidentally killed four patients by unlocking a medicine cabinet and adding concentrated chloral to their sleeping draughts. The inquiry was ‘curious’ – particularly given reported earlier, similar deaths – but the kindly Coroner accepted Dr Farquharson’s explanation that he could not say how he had made the mistake.

Did Philip reform his ways? Not a bit of it. In the December, halfway through Sarah’s treatment, Philip is summoned for leaving his cart unattended and fined an additional five shillings for providing a false name to the police. The following month he is fined ten shillings – which would have been around half a week’s wages – for letting his horse and cart go before him without a light, whilst he was reeling about in the road. His defence was that he had taken too much beer from a few Christmas boxes he’d been given.

Three months before Sarah’s release, the 1901 census reveals that the two children – Ada and George – were with Sarah’s mother and Philip was back with his parents eight miles away. Perhaps his dad reminded him about the letter.

There is no evidence of Sarah being readmitted. A year or two later Philip and Sarah moved seventy miles north to Sheffield, perhaps with the intention of making a fresh start. Philip became a drayman for the Midland Railways at the old Wicker Station, but I can see that in April 1914 he was before the magistrate again charged with being drunk in charge of a horse and cart.

Philip and Sarah must have done something to make each other happy because they went on to have a further eight children, five of whom survived infancy. They had been married for almost forty years when Philip died in 1936 at the age of 65. The family story was that he was kicked in the head by a drayhorse, but I can find no evidence for this in newspaper reports, and his death certificate simply lists heart failure, myocarditis and cerebral haemorrhage. Sarah died in 1963 still living in Sheffield.

The 125 year old advice on marriage from my 2 x great grandparents seems to have stood the test of time quite well.

Bibliography

1. The letter from my 2 x great grandparents was (in 2000) in the possession of grandmother’s youngest brother. Copy in my possession. I have retained the original (lack of) punctuation.
   
2. Sarah was admitted to Litchfield County Lunatic Asylum on 21 June 1900 as patient number 5730. Records obtained from Staffordshire Records Office.
   
3. Details of the Asylum, including the story of Dr Farquharson, are from Budden, D. (1989) A County Lunatic Asylum: The History of St Matthew’s Hospital, Burntwood. UK: D. Budden, p.59 and p.65.
   
4. Philip’s employment records are from London and North Western, Operating, Traffic, Coaching Depts, 1833-1899, 1894-1899 Punishments. p84 and p94. Available at: http://www.ancestry.co.uk
   
5. Details of fines for drinking taken from Walsall Advertiser 28 April 1900, p8f; 5 December 1900, p5h; and 12 January 1901, p8e and Yorkshire Telegraph and Star 30 April 1914, p6d.