What happened to all the women?

Retrieving the lost lives of Great Rollright

This photo was taken by folk song collector Cecil Sharp in July 1909. The woman standing behind Richard Widdows is most likely to be a neighbour, who cared for the elderly shepherd after his wife’s death in 1902. Photo: courtesy of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, English Folk Dance and Song Society.

Shepherd Richard Widdows (aka Withers) had a lot of women in his life. He had two wives and seven daughters. It is often difficult to uncover the lives of men from modest backgrounds in rural society, but women are all but invisible. There are few, if any, surviving images of them, giving a sense of the faces behind the names. Prior to the 20^th century, photography was largely the preserve of formal photographers and the more affluent. (We only have photos of Widdows, dating from the early 1900s, due to the public interest in his great age.) However, the official records – though skeletal – do provide some important pointers as to the fortunes of the women in the Widdows family.

First wife, Eliza Penn, and her daughters

Frank Holl, Peeling Potatoes, c 1880; Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund.

Eliza Penn and Widdows were married on 13 February 1835 in Stretton-on-Fosse, Warwickshire, just over 3 miles from Shipston-on-Stour. Bride and groom are both listed as of the parish, so it is likely that Widdows was working locally when they met. Eliza was almost 20 and Widdows 23 when they married. Baptised in the nearby village of Blockley in July 1815, Eliza’s family later moved to Stretton-on-Fosse. Her parents, Martha and Thomas Penn, appear in the 1841 and 1851 censuses in Stretton-on-Fosse. Thomas Penn at the age of 60 in 1841 is recorded as an agricultural labourer. By 1851, both parents are past working age and listed as paupers.

In 1841, Eliza was living with Widdows at Fletchers’ Coomb Farm, just outside Great Rollright, and they already had four children: Ann (5), Elizabeth (4), John (1), Mary (0). The couple went on to have a fifth child Joseph in 1846. Eliza died three years later at the age of 34 in 1849. Causes of death were not registered at this time, so it is impossible to know what Eliza died from. It could have been child birth or an illness triggered by the poor living conditions in the dilapidated and damp farm homestead.

For Eliza’s daughters, the loss of their mother at such a young age must have been devastating. In the 1851 census, the oldest daughter Ann, born in 1836, remains at home with her widowed father and siblings, presumably taking Eliza’s place, undertaking all the unremitting domestic chores required of running a house with no water or energy supply: collecting water and wood, cooking and cleaning. If circumstances had been different, Ann, aged 15, would have already been in service. Her younger brother John, aged 13, was listed as a farmer’s boy. In 1854, the same year that Widdows remarried, Ann also wed Thomas Bull, a stone mason, from Chipping Norton. In the census returns of 1861, the Bulls are found living together in Chipping Norton. The couple, however, soon made a move to Oxford. On 1 August 1863, the Oxford University and City Herald reports: ‘that Thomas Bull, mason of Chipping Norton, was charged with assaulting his wife Ann Bull. He is at work in Oxford, residing in St. Clement’s, his wife cohabiting with another man. He quarrelled in a public house with this man, and fought, and when his wife interfered he struck her in the face also. Under the circumstances, the Bench imposed the mitigated penalty of 5s. and costs.’ After the assault charge, Ann disappears entirely from official records. She may have taken a new name, making her difficult to trace. In 1881, Thomas Bull turns up again in Chipping Norton, aged 50: a boarder in a house, his status is given as single.

The two younger daughters from Eliza’s and Widdows’ marriage both left the village to go into service in London. Elizabeth Withers, aged 22, appears in the 1861 census as a servant in Clerkenwell St James in the home of merchant Ralph Handcock, living with his wife, two sons, two brothers and three lodgers. Elizabeth was only supported in her domestic tasks for this large household by a young maid of 13. Mary Ann, aged 19, was also working in Clerkenwell by this date, for Will H Allen, a printer’s reader, his wife, mother and two young sons. The two women do not appear in census returns after this date. However, banns were issued for a marriage in 1882 in Great Rollright for a Mary Ann Withers to John Smith of Great Barford, so perhaps Mary Ann returned home to marry locally.

Second wife, Jane Wiggins, and her daughters

Harold Gilman, The Kitchen, 1908 – 9. ArtUK: Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales.

Jane Wiggins was born in January 1825, in Shipston-on-Stour, to Mary and Samuel Wiggins. Her parents were non-conformists. She had a Wesleyan baptism in Chipping Norton. Her father was a butcher. Like her stepdaughters, Jane entered service in her mid-teens. At fifteen, she was working for a schoolteacher in the village of Brailes and by the age of 26, in 1851, she was employed as a farm servant in Todenham, near Moreton-in-Marsh. When Jane and Richard Withers had their marriage banns issued in October 1854, they were both listed as of the parish. It may be that Jane moved to Great Rollright before she met Widdows to take up a domestic position.

Jane and Widdows had six children together: Louisa, Eliza, Emma Jane, Soloman, David and Sarah. Their oldest daughter Louisa, or Lucy, was born in 1855. By the age of 15, she was working in Todenham for the Shephard family, her mother’s previous employers. In 1875, she married George Hemmings, an agricultural labourer, in Shipston-on-Stour, where they had 8 children together. She must have maintained ties with her family as her 16-year-old daughter, Milly, is listed as a general servant in Great Rollright in the 1891 census. Her husband George shifted his occupation over time from farm work to labouring, finally becoming a bricklayer. Two daughters were recorded as a milliner and dressmaker in 1901. Then surprisingly after over 35 years of living in Shipston, in 1911, Louisa turns up in the census returns as head of a household in Norwood, Middlesex. It appears that her husband had died and that the 56-year-old Louisa moved with six of her grown up children to set up a dressmaking business. Louisa’s occupation, along with four of her daughters, is given as hand needle work; and her 27-year-old son’s occupation is recorded as tailor. In 1915, Louisa died four years later, in Uxbridge.

Born in 1857, Eliza, Jane’s second daughter, had a position as a servant in Aberdare in Glamorgan by the age of 15, employed by Thos Davenport, an inspector on the railways, and his family. By the age of 24, in 1881, Eliza had moved back closer to home to work in St Mary, Berkshire. It is this stage that we lose sight of her.

Jane and Widdows’ third daughter Emma Jane was born in 1860, like her sisters, she went into service. In the 1881 census, she shows up as a servant at Home Farm in Kidlington. Six years later at the age of 27, she married Henry Charlton, a baker from Hampshire. By 1891, the couple had moved to Reading, where they were living with a lodger and a young visitor of 13. They didn’t have any children of their own. Emma Jane was one of Widdows’ three surviving daughters. She makes an appearance in several of the newspaper reports covering Widdows’ longevity. The Oxfordshire Weekly News mentions that Emma Jane and her husband made the journey from Reading for Widdows’ 103^rd Birthday. They are also noted as mourners at his funeral. On 29 October 1937, a feature celebrating the couple’s golden wedding anniversary was included in the Reading Standard, giving a snapshot of their hard-working life together. Henry is described as having been employed as a baker for 31 years before ‘afterwards taking up greengrocery and continuing his round daily until recently’ and Emma Jane ‘who is 78, was in business in the Covered Market, Reading, for 48 years, dealing in poultry and general goods, until January last, when her health failed. Her retirement was regretted by many customers, as her pleasant disposition gained for her many friends.’ Emma Jane only lived a further year until 1938 and Henry Charlton died the year afterwards.

Sarah, Widdows’ youngest child, was born in 1871, when Jane was 46 and Widdows was 59. She was recorded as ‘imbecile’ in the 1881 and 1891 censuses: a disparaging 19^th-century term for an individual with a mild learning disability. Sarah only lived until 1892, dying at the age of 21.

Scattered Lives

Entering service in their teens, Widdows’ daughters (and his wives before them) all had to fend for themselves from an early age. Living in a household among strangers, they were vulnerable to abuse – left at the mercy of employers and older members of staff. They were also widely dispersed, living a long way from family. They went wherever there was work. It is difficult to imagine how bewildering sooty Clerkenwell must have been, with its dirty printworks and workshops, for the young Elizabeth and Mary Ann, after a childhood in an isolated Oxfordshire valley. It is inexplicable to us now that the 15-year-old Eliza should be sent off to take up a situation as far away as Aberdare in Wales. With the average maid working as many as 90 hours a week, marriage must have presented itself as a means of escape. Ann certainly propelled herself into a violent marriage to stone mason Thomas Bull, possibly motivated by the desire to vacate the family home when her father brought home his new wife. The reality of a domestic’s life was very different from the cosy vision that is sold on Upstairs, Downstairs and Downtown Abbey. It was insecure and erratic with servants moving regularly between households. Only Louisa and Emma Jane seemed to establish stable homes for themselves with their husbands. Ann, Elizabeth and Eliza all but disappear, they may well, like many Victorian women, have fallen through the cracks into prostitution or had illegitimate children out of view of the official records. With the exception of Sarah, who was labelled ‘imbecile’, none of Widdows’ daughters, unlike their brothers, who became local agricultural labourers, were afforded the comfort of remaining close to home in Great Rollright.