My Other Great Aunt
There were three sisters, all named after daughters of Queen Victoria, living in the big house. Beatrice was the eldest, born I guess around 1900 she would have been expected to get married in the 1920s, but blessed with an unprepossessing character and even more unprepossessing looks she didn’t. Men were in short supply round our way after the Great War and suitable men in the social circle of my well off great grandparents even less so. But living in the big house with servants, well at least a cook/housekeeper, a maid and daily cleaner (this wasn’t Downton Abbey), life must have been fairly comfortable.
My great grandfather didn’t own the company that made and sold manhole covers, it seems to have been jointly owned with his cousin. At some point he seems to have been bought out and he started up his own ironmongery business. Anyway by the war money seems to have been tighter and servants weren’t to be had, so she became a sort of unpaid cook/housekeeper and general dogsbody to her parents.
Then when she was 55 her parents died in rapid succession. The business, the house and what was left of the money all went to the son, at least according to my mother, perhaps there was nothing left, I don’t know she never spoke to him again and he moved to somewhere posh down south. This left Beatrice penniless and homeless. She got a job as a cleaner and I met her as a child living in a one roomed bedsit over a shop, a fat, bitter old woman. It’s sad, but the one thing I remember is that she didn’t have a television! Strange, what things strike us as children.
She had a stroke soon after and I never saw her again.
My great grandfather didn’t own the company that made and sold manhole covers, it seems to have been jointly owned with his cousin. At some point he seems to have been bought out and he started up his own ironmongery business. Anyway by the war money seems to have been tighter and servants weren’t to be had, so she became a sort of unpaid cook/housekeeper and general dogsbody to her parents.
Then when she was 55 her parents died in rapid succession. The business, the house and what was left of the money all went to the son, at least according to my mother, perhaps there was nothing left, I don’t know she never spoke to him again and he moved to somewhere posh down south. This left Beatrice penniless and homeless. She got a job as a cleaner and I met her as a child living in a one roomed bedsit over a shop, a fat, bitter old woman. It’s sad, but the one thing I remember is that she didn’t have a television! Strange, what things strike us as children.
She had a stroke soon after and I never saw her again.
