I never knew them. My mother never talked about them. My grandmother never mentioned them. There are only two photographs that I have in hand that can give me an image of one of them. They had no children as far as I know. I knew where one of them was born for certain and where one of them might have been born. I know where they met and when they married. I know where they lived and worked and where they retired to. I also know where they both died.
Other than this, I know nothing about them. What then do I do with this information. One of them was a war hero in the First World War and he would have had a set of medals. Did they ever have holidays as we know them? Did they take or have photographs taken for their memory album?
I think of all the photographs and pictures and objects that we all gather as part of our life story. What then happens to them. Many of our possessions will be thrown out when we finish our lives, apart from some sentimental items that our offspring will wish to keep.
This is why having a computer, and the internet, comes in handy because we can store a lot of documents and photos, and these stories that I write, in the cloud as they say.
Which is where John and Jennie will remain until someone else miraculously wants to discover them and make their own connections.
My great uncle John Wilcox was born in London in 1893 and went on to become milkman, a soldier, a war hero, a dairyman. In that order. He remained a dairyman all his life. The trade of the Dairyman was essential to daily domestic life especially during the decades up until the 1960’s. They became mini grocers eventually selling all the dairy and associated products of cheese, sugar and bacon and tea. It was the domain of the milkman where milk was frequently delivered twice a day in the pre refrigerator days. The Dairy would often have a stable at the back with the horse and dray for deliveries. I don’t think John Wilcox had a horse, just a shop, from what I can see of the Chelsea street he was trading in, and so I wonder if he was delivering milk to the doorstep.
At the time that he met Dorothy Jane, who was known as Jennie, in Clerkenwell, I imagine that there were deliveries and folk collecting milk in large jugs. Milk went off quickly in the summer months and the only way to preserve it was to heat it to simmering point and letting it cool. Otherwise, milk would have to be purchased twice a day.
John and Jennie were married in one of London’s Welsh churches by a famous Welsh clergyman who was also a poet, hymn writer and Welsh Bard. After which they went to the West end of London and finally set up their own dairy in Chelsea. They retired in the 1950’s and lived in a nice mansion flat.
At this point I have lost them. Until they died and their circumstances that I can understand from their death registration certificates are intriguing.
Jennie was the first to die. That was on 26th March 1966 when she was 82 years old. She was described as the wife of Richard Howard Wilcox, a retired Dairyman. It is intriguing that whoever reported the death omitted his first name John. Also interesting is that it was not my great uncle John who reported the death, but a man called Gwylim Rees who lived at 66 Tring Avenue in Ealing. In his ’informant’ box he is described as “Causing the body to be buried”. This is a phrase used by Registrars to indicate that there was no one else around to instruct an undertaker. Jennie died at 356 Uxbridge Road, Acton. Google Street View shows me a very large residential house that could well have been a care home or nursing home. Gwylim Rees lived in a nice residential, leafy, street in Ealing. Was he the manager of the house that Jennie was residing in at the time?
John was aged 73 when Jennie died. It is probable that he left the funeral arrangements to the place where she was residing to deal with. The certificate states ‘causing the body to be buried’ which means that there will be a cemetery to be found.
When John died in 1983 at the age of 90, he also was living in a care home, Ashley Lodge in Carlton Road, Ealing. Things had changed by this date because given John had no family members to arrange his funeral, I must presume this was organised by the manager of the home, but the certificate does not indicate that.
John and Jennie had an industrious and creative life working in a trade that they knew well and would appear to have been successful in. They were relatively well off, and John left an estate of over £50,000 that I have no idea who it went to. There is a UK government site for searching for probate and will documents that were registered in the 20th century. It may be early days for this new search facility because even with the detail that I have about John’s death, I can find no lead on his will and who executed it.
It astonishes me that nobody in my family knew anything about John and Jennie, a fascinating couple who I am sure would have had so many stories to tell, especially about John’s older brothers who had fled London to live in Wales. I have several of their records and can produce facts from them, but I cannot find any other evidence about their lives to substantiate the stories that I have written about them in previous posts.
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