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My Fallen Woman
Margaret Wilson (1841 – 1926)
Margaret is my favourite ancestor. It was learning about her from my mother and her sisters when I was about eight years old that began my fascination with Family History. However, she remains my most elusive great grandparent. Whenever I’ve managed to locate possible documents about her, the relevant ones are always missing or have been destroyed. The report of her funeral is brief and her son’s diary of 1915 has no specific reference to her. Family documents are non-existent because my mother’s eldest brother apparently destroyed all the documents and papers when their father died in the 1920s.
Margaret was the first of my Scottish line that I discovered and this may have influenced my early interest in her. Discovering that I had Scottish ancestry was something special and rather romantic. Frankly, being Welsh when one is born in Wales, having parents and grandparents born in Wales, and when one’s friends are all Welsh was not very exciting for an eight year old. I was different! I had Scottish ancestry.
My mother and her sisters used to talk about their Scottish grandmother, especially at Christmas time. Margaret had been a tall woman who always dressed in black and wore jet earrings and beads. I have Margaret’s silver and gilt daisy brooch, and remember a broken jet drop-earring of hers in my mother’s button box. She walked with a stick (they thought she might have broken her leg at some stage). She was over 80 when she died in the 1920s. My aunty remembered her having ‘at least’ four brothers. Two of them seemed to have gone to SE Asia (I recall Borneo, Sarawak and Malaya being mentioned). When they came home, they brought her exotic presents. (I later discovered that they were her nephews). Margaret had never married but had had two children, my grandfather, James Frederick, and a daughter (Aunty Polly, they thought). Margaret was, by the early 1900s, the caretaker/cleaner of the Top Wharf offices of Black Park Colliery but, before that, had either taken in laundry or worked in a laundry. They couldn’t quite remember. My mother, born in 1909, remembered helping her with her cleaning. They knew no more about their grandmother and nothing about her parents Robert and Jane Wilson, who had died before they were born.
My sister and I acquired a red exercise book (the ones with shiny grooved covers, with tables and useful information on the back) and started writing down what we had discovered about Margaret and her family. We found the grave where she was buried with her parents in the old Church Yard in Chirk. I can still visualise the black tombstone standing under the yew tree to the north east of the church. Sadly, it is not now there, although her brother’s headstone which was beside it, is. Robert, we were told, had come from Dumfries to be a shepherd on the Wynnstay Estate in Ruabon and later the family had moved to the Top Wharf, Chirk.
From the tombstone, we knew the approximate dates of birth of Margaret and her parents. This took us back to the early years of the nineteenth century, but to get any further with the Wilson line – and find out why they had moved to Wales – we would have to go to Dumfries. I finally went there in the autumn of 2003 after I had discovered a vast amount of information about this extraordinary line.
Margaret was born at Bodylltyn Lodge, Wynnstay Park, Ruabon and baptized on 3rd October 1841. No birth record has been found. She was the second known daughter of Robert Wilson and Jean/Jane Burgess. Robert took up employment as a shepherd for the Wynnstay Estate in the summer of 1833 after moving with his father-in-law from Kirkcudbrightshire to North Wales.
In 1851, Margaret, aged nine, her parents, brothers William (19) and Robert (14), and her sister Jane, aged 12, are at Rhosymedre/Bodylltyn Lodge. Robert, senior, is a shepherd, William is a gardener, Robert, junior, is an agricultural labourer and Jane and Margaret are scholars. Another brother, John (born 1833), was with his maternal grandparents in 1841 (Maesafallen, Llanfor, Merionethshire) and his aunts in 1851 in Gyffylliog, Denbighshire.
All of the Wilson and Burgess families were literate (dame school teachers, signing certificates, writing letters. etc.) so I assume that Margaret was either taught at home by her mother or went to one of the many schools in the Ruabon area. E. K. Jones, The Story of Education in a Welsh Border Parish, 1934, lists at least eight private venture schools that were operational in the parish when Margaret was of school age. However, it is most likely that she attended the Rhosymedre National (Church) School which was not far from her home. The teachers at this time were John and Elizabeth Jones, both originally from the Llantysilio/Minera area of Denbighshire, about eight miles to the west of Ruabon. The Report of the 1847 Commission on Education in Wales, quoted by Jones, records Rhosymedre Church School as:
A school for boys and girls, taught together by a master and mistress, in a school built for the purpose. Number of scholars, 112: number employed as monitors, 8. Subjects professed to be taught — The Bible, Church Catechism, reading and writing, arithmetic, grammar and music. Fees, twopence per week, and sixpence at entrance.
I examined this school January 20, when 61 children where present, 16 of these could read a chapter from the Bible, 10 could write legibly upon paper, and 2 were learning arithmetic. I found only 4 who were able to answer questions upon Holy Scriptures.The master and mistress are husband and wife. The master was originally a farmer, he commenced teaching at 33 years of age, having spent six months at a parochial school in the neighbourhood to learn the National System. The mistress has never received any kind of training. The amount of their acquirements enables them to teach the children to read, and more cannot be expected, considering the salary of both does not exceed £21 6s 0d.The building contains two spacious schoolrooms, but for want of funds, only one is occupied. The appearance of this room indicates great poverty. Books, Cards, Blackboards and Copy-books are all greatly wanted.….[.the school] is in a great measure supported by the pence of the children….many of the inhabitants being very poor, are unable to pay the high rate of payment which is necessary. Eight or nine children are regularly taught free, at the expense of the master, who is himself very poor; and many others are in effect taught gratuitously. There are no subscriptions properly so called. The salary of the master is raised by casual gratuities obtained by the officiating minister, who is responsible from the ample endowments which have been provided for the benefit of the parish, but, owing to for all expenses. The school derives no advantage neglect above mentioned, [sic] … are practically useless to the inhabitants. The local contributions are expended for the benefit of the town of Ruabon…..all the children (112) took music, religious instruction was given by the master and the ‘minister’… the school opened with a hymn or prayer… the ‘minister’ was the school ‘visitor’… English language and English Grammar were taught… the master and mistress were aged 43 and 44 respectively…£16 of their salary came from School-pence … they had a house and garden rent-free (pages 61-62)
During the 1850s the family moved from the Wynnstay Estate to Ty Mawr Cottage, Cefn Bychan, Ruabon, where her sister Jane died of typhus in 1855. While the social and sanitary conditions in the Ruabon parish were somewhat better than those of London and the large urban conurbations that were rapidly expanding (see, for example, Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the London People, Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor), it was not an idyllic rural area of large country estates and farmland. The parish contained coal mines, iron works and brickworks and, by the 1850s, had attracted a large population of migrant workers.
George Borrow describes the Cefn Bychan/Cefn Mawr area of Ruabon parish in the account of his travels in Wales (Wild Wales, 1862)
I debouched upon the Llangollen road near to the tramway leading to the collieries. Two enormous sheets of flame shot up high into the air from ovens, illuminating the spectral chimneys as high as steeples, also smoky buildings, and grimy figures moving about. There was a clanging of engines, a noise of shovels and a falling of coals truly horrible … Advancing along the tramway I obtained a nearer view of the hellish buildings, the chimneys and the demonic figures. It was just such a scene as one of those described by Ellis Wynn in his Vision of Hell. (Fontana edition, 1982, page 317)
It is not surprising then that a member of the Wilson family, although living in the rural fringe of this area, succumbed to one of the more common diseases of the times.
By 1861 Margaret, aged 18, was working as a laundry maid at Wynnstay Hall in the household of the William Wynn family. She was probably still working there before the birth of her first child in 1864 and, possibly, before her second child was born in November 1866, though this is less likely. Although there is no concrete evidence, it is probable that she would have been dismissed when her employers first discovered that she was pregnant, given the strict mores of mid-Victorian Britain. The Bastardy Clause in the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act shifted the responsibility and, by implication, the guilt of illegitimacy onto the mother: women cannot walk away from conception. These social attitudes towards – and the predicament of – unmarried mothers and their children is sympathetically dealt with in Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell and by Dickens in David Copperfield and Oliver Twist. A detailed account of this legislation, the dominant social attitudes and outcomes is given in a paper by Dorothy Haller.
Margaret had the following known children:
Mary Jane, born 29 January 1864, Top Wharf, Chirk, Denbighshire
James Frederick, born 29 November 1866, Morda Workhouse, Oswestry, Shropshire
(Chirk was in the Oswestry Poor Law Union)
Family accounts suggest that the two children had the same father, although I have no way of proving this, and it might have been wishful thinking by Margaret’s granddaughters – the source of my information. Neither birth certificates list a father, nor do the baptismal records. The records for the Morda Workhouse, where James was born, are missing for that period. My great grandfather could have been any – or none – of the male members of the Wynnstay household: family, guests or staff. Equally, he could have been anyone in the local community or a sojourner. I will never know.
Margaret and her two children do not appear to have ever lived together. I am attempting to trace Margaret’s life between the time that she registered the birth of James on 10th December 1866, when she was still at Morda, and the 1871 census, but because of the missing workhouse records this is extremely difficult. By 1871 Margaret is ‘training for domestic service’ at Tindal Street, Balsall Heath, Kings Norton, Worcestershire. Tindal Street was described as a ‘Refuge for Fallen Women’ and was run by William and Jemima Garner, missionary and matron, respectively. At some time between the end of 1866 and 1871, Margaret must have either discharged herself, or been discharged, from the Morda Workhouse (as able-bodied). Alternatively, she could have agreed, or been forced, to move to the Tindal Street Refuge. It has been suggested, and it is possible, that she had moved to the Birmingham area and had become a prostitute but had been ‘rescued’ by the particular religious group (possibly Salvation Army) that ran the Refuge. At the moment, I have no firm evidence for this. William Booth discusses the conditions of prostitutes and their route into this oldest profession in chapter six of In Darkest England and the Way Out, first published in 1890. The Tindal Street Refuge was taken over by the Birmingham City Mission in 1886. This Mission did a considerable amount of work rescuing prostitutes and had opened an earlier Refuge in Edgbaston, Birmingham in 1858. I am currently researching the pre-1886 ownership and organisation of Tindal Street and will add the results of this investigation in the Places section.
Meanwhile, daughter Mary Jane, aged seven, was living with her grandparents, who were still at Top Wharf, where she had been born. Also with them was Margaret’s younger brother, Alexander Gordon, aged 16 and a carpenter. Still at Morda Workhouse, son James Frederick was listed as a ‘pauper’, aged three (he would have been four) and having been born in Chirk. Each time I look at this census page I feel a mixture of anger and sadness. How could Margaret’s parents have kept one grandchild but allowed the other to grow up in a Workhouse, without any knowledge of family life? They were probably poor, they were getting old – Robert would have been over 60 and Jean 56 when James was born – but this does not assuage my anger at this rejection of my Grandfather. It might also explain some of the, to me, strange domestic circumstances that my Mother has talked about, where her father was very rarely at home and, seemingly, little love was shown towards the children.
By 1881, both Margaret (admitting to being 32!) and daughter Mary Jane, are working as domestic servants in the household of Edmund Hill, a woollen merchant, in Stockport Road, Altrincham, Cheshire. Mary Jane gave this as her address on her marriage certificate of April 1883. On this certificate, her father is listed as Robert Wilson, shepherd. Did Mary Jane believe that Robert and Jean were her parents or was she ashamed to give no name? Whether she ever knew that she was illegitimate is impossible to ascertain but certainly her (known) descendants had no knowledge of this until I gave them the information. James Frederick had, by 1881, been apprenticed to an Andrew Jones, butcher, of St Martins, Shropshire and was living with the Jones family.
At some point after her father’s death in May 1884, Margaret returned to Top Wharf, Chirk; probably to help her 74 year old mother who became the caretaker/cleaner for the Black Park Colliery Offices, located at Top Wharf. Mary Jane was living in Oakfield Road/Street, Altrincham with her husband and children and James relinquished his apprenticeship and became a coal miner. It would seem that Margaret did not return home until after the death of her father. Possibly, on discovering his daughter’s second pregnancy, Robert became the ‘Victorian father’ and issued a ‘never darken my door’ command. Again, this is something I will never know.
In the 1891 census, Margaret was living with her mother in Top Wharf and son James was living a few doors away with Margaret’s brother Alexander Gordon and family. He was recorded as ‘nephew’ – recognised at last as one of the family. Jean Wilson nee Burgess died in February 1893 and Margaret took over the tenancy and caretaker/cleaner role at Top Wharf. In the 1901 census, she was living alone there and described as an Office caretaker. Her son James, now married, was living about one and a half miles away at 132 Chirk Green. He had had four children in the first eight years of marriage, the second and third of whom had been born at Top Wharf.
James was a coal miner and later a dialler (surveyor) in the local coal mine. My father remembered him as a man of very upright stature (‘military bearing’) who was always immaculately dressed. James was fond of horse racing and ‘country pursuits’ and had won prizes for target shooting. His daughters found him a remote person but he appears to have been concerned about their education; offering to pay for his scholarly youngest daughter to attend the local County School in Llangollen. In his diary of 1915 he records meeting his sons at Whittington Barracks, Shropshire – both were serving with the Royal Welsch Fusiliers – and his eldest daughter’s address in Manchester. His cousins, Alexander Gordon’s sons, also feature: meeting them in London and visiting them in Wrexham. He notes the ‘splendid’ meals that he had at ‘the Wharf’ but very little is mentioned about his own home, and nothing about his wife and younger children.
He seems to have befriended the local GP and his family and, by 1914, was batman to the son, Capt. Lloyd, in the 3/1 Battalion Welsh Horse Yeomanry as a Lance Corporal. The Welsh Horse Battalion was disbanded in 1917 and members were transferred to the 4th Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers. James’s World War 1 medal card (below) shows that he became a Private in this Battalion. A more detailed account of James’s military service will be given in the Work section. James died ofmyocarditis, endocarditis, cardiac failure and hypostatic pneumonia on 21st June 1924 at Chirk Cottage Hospital and a military funeral took place on 29th June. The brief account of his funeral (The Oswestry Advertizer, 2nd July 1924) reports that
Mr Wilson was was well known in the district and respected. The funeral was military, bearing tribute to a fine record of army service and over one hundred persons attended it. The pall bearers were six soldiers from the local unit. Over the grave the “Last Post” was sounded and three volleys fired.
Margaret outlived her son by 18 months, dying ‘suddenly’ at Top Wharf on 13th January 1926, aged 84. The cause of death was recorded as ‘probably heart failure’. She was buried in the same grave as her parents, under the yew tree, in the church yard, Chirk. There is a very brief report of her funeral in the local newspaper (The Oswestry Advertizer), which reports the chief mourners (her grandsons and nephews), the bearers and that ‘many beautiful floral tributes were sent’.
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The story of Margaret’s ancestors continues on the Wilson-Burgess page.
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