Ramblings

Kath (left) with her cousin Ruth

My mother’s birth was “illegitimate”, although she probably never knew it*. When she was born in January 1925, it was “out of wedlock” as they called it. I didn’t find that out until after she died.

She grew up believing that her parents, Sallie and Jack, were first spouses to each other. She had noticed, though, that her parents never marked special wedding anniversaries. When Jack died in 1968, Sallie felt able to tell Mum some, at least, of the truth. Sallie had been married to a man called Davy for a few years before she met Jack.

Her brother Tom then returned from the Great War with his friend and fellow soldier Jack. Sallie fell in love with Jack, and eventually left Davy to live with him.

When Sallie died in 1971, Mum in turn was able to tell my brother and me this story. She also told us that her older brother, Philip, had been illegitimate, but that her parents had wed before she was born. We thought the story terribly romantic, and imagined the handsome young Jack rescuing Sallie from the brutish Davy.

And so the story lay, until my father died in 2015. Among his papers were envelopes containing correspondence about the family trees of each of my grandparents. Dad hadn’t researched the family trees himself, but had replied to enquiries about both his own family and Mum’s, and had kept the papers. I started an account on Ancestry, initially intending simply to rationalise the information on an online tree. But of course by then I had momentum, and kept going, using the software to identify grand-aunts and -uncles, great grandparents, second and third cousins etc…

The most reliable and useful sources of information for genealogists besides the ten-yearly censuses (which are made public only after 100 years) are birth, marriage and death certificates. I was soon ordering these regularly to confirm and extend my tree. Naturally, one of the things I was most curious about was my grandparents’ history. Was I nosey? Prurient? Disrespectful, to be raking over the ashes of these ancient shenanigans? Was it irrelevant, after all this time? Yes, all of those. But we genealogists love nothing more than a century-old scandal, and the opportunity to join the dots between the official records and the story I had heard was irresistible.

The record of Sallie’s first wedding, to Davy, showed that it took place in August 1910. But what about her second wedding, to Jack? My mother was born on 4th January 1925, and her brother Philip exactly three years earlier in 1922. What would the marriage record reveal?

It told us that Sallie and Jack married on 3rd February 1927, more than two years after Kathleen was born. Sallie was mentally sharp to the end, and must have known that Kathleen, as well as Philip, had been illegitimate. So did she hide this from her daughter, to protect her own reputation, or to spare her daughter’s feelings? Or perhaps Kathleen hid the full story from my brother and me out of a misplaced sense of shame – after all, she had no agency over her birth status – or to spare our feelings. But it seemed important to her to believe she was legitimately born, and it appears more likely that it was Sallie who was being economical with the truth.

Kathleen had older cousins who knew the secrets of her parents’ courtship and marriage, but it seems they acted with discretion. One cousin, Marjorie, twelve years older than Kathleen, used to tell a story which undermined the narrative Rob and I had concocted about Sallie’s first husband: she remembered Davy as a sweet and gentle soul, who would give her rides on his bicycle.

I hadn’t finished muckraking yet. For a small charge, I obtained the record of the divorce between Sallie and Davy. It makes scandalous reading.

The most striking sentence – in almost biblical language – detailed how Sallie and Jack “lived and cohabited and and frequently committed adultery together” at Chester, Runcorn and at “divers other places”. This was startling, remembering as I do Sallie as a kind, warm-hearted white haired old lady, and Jack as a quiet, shy and pious man. And Runcorn will never be the same again. The divorce was not finalised until 17th January 1927, and Sallie and Jack then wasted no time, getting married just seventeen days later.

Divorce was a lengthy procedure – this one was initiated by Davy two years after Philip was born, and took almost three years to complete. Sallie was nearly forty by then. Small wonder she and Jack had not waited for the divorce to go through before starting their family.

A couple of years ago, my daughter drew my attention to an intriguing dedication inside a volume of Tennyson’s poems which we had passed on to her. It was headed S Brockbank – Jack’s surname – and dated Christmas 1919. It read “To Sallie, My very dear Wife & closest companion, From her sincere devoted husband Jack”.

Why would Jack dedicate the book to his “wife” Sallie in 1919, when she was still married to Davy and living with him? Perhaps he was promising Sallie that he would marry her when he could. Or perhaps this inscription was added or amended retrospectively to deflect questions from inquisitive children about the date of their marriage.

Discovering the long kept secret of my mother’s birth of course made no difference to my affection for her, or my memory of her intense, fiercely loving character – why should it? She had no control over these events. But if anything it strengthened my respect for grandmother Sallie: independent, romantic, and ruthless in pursuit of love and in her desire for a family. Her ‘desertion’ of Davy caused a big scandal at the time, and she was ostracised by some of her own family. But who would judge her or Jack for putting love first? I certainly wouldn’t. I have every reason to be grateful.

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PS

*Yes she did. One thing I like about blogging is that the piece is never really finished. There is always the chance of new information coming in from readers, and I have been able to join a few more dots thanks to an unexpected source – my cousin Susan, from my father’s side of my family. Her message sheds new light on the matter.

“I just read your latest Ramblings post about Kath, and may be able to add something. Long after Sallie died, Kath and Aelwyn went to visit an elderly relation, who told her the whole story just as you related it. Kath was pretty shocked as you can imagine and told my Mum the whole story. So Kath did know the circumstances of her birth but maybe chose not to tell you and Rob. I seem to recall as well that Kath was told Sallie had a number of earlier pregnancies when she was married to Davy. Sallie was a very strong woman!”

The most likely candidate for the “elderly relative” is Doris, Kathleen’s favourite auntie, who lived to be ninety nine, and died only four years before her. She would certainly have known the full story, being seventeen years old at the time of Sallie’s “desertion” of Davy, and Kath and Aelwyn regularly used to visit Doris and her partner Norman.

And Mum knew, but chose not to tell us. How absurd, this misplaced sense of shame. Did she think our love and respect for her was conditional, so fragile that this news would change the way we felt about her? Did she think I was prudish? Love you, Mum.