It was to differentiate her from my paternal grandmother, that was why she was called London Grandma. The other one was Country Grandma. One lived in London, obviously, and the other lived in the countryside. Well, Limpsfield in Surrey when I was a child was definitely in the countryside. I have no idea what it is like now.
London Grandma was born in 1890 to Victorian parents who initially started life in North London but before 1890 had moved to the village of Offord D’Arcy in what was then known as Huntingdonshire, but the village is now in Cambridgeshire. Grace Adelaide Walker was born on 11th August 1890. The earliest record of life in the village is the 1901 Census return, and it shows that on the day of the count there was Grace aged 10 and her cousin Percy Felstead, aged 10, who was visiting. There was also her Dad, Cornelius Walker, with the first record that I have had for his occupation, “of independent means”, and I still have no clue to what and where his income came from. However, her Mother, Susan, was not at home on the day of the count.
By 1911, when Grace Walker was 21, she was a lodger in the household of Jane Wilkins, in Acton, West London. I have written an interesting post about the make-up of the house in which Grace was living in Acton. It was a boarding house for women. Some who were married and some who were not. Some with children and some without. I have tried to understand the purpose of this boarding house and concluded that it may have been for the purpose of helping women with childbirth where discretion was required. Jane Wilkins, in the Census return that year, described Grace as her cousin. This would make sense to me because Jane was obviously related to the Wilkins side of her maternal family. Grace’s Grandmother was Frances Wilkins who married John Furnell. When Grace was living in Jane Wilkin’s house, she was working as a Clerk in a commercial laundry. Just up the road lived her future husband, William Wilcox, who was a Dairyman, delivering milk. They married in July 1914. They were both 23 years old.
The rest is history that I write about regularly. The next fifty years was all about work, less about education, and all about bettering oneself in small business.
Grace and William, who she always called Billy, brought up four daughters, Grace, Rene, Dorothy and Molly all who are no longer with us and only a small number of their children, including me, are still alive.
Billy died the same year that I was born in 1947, and he knew me for only a few months. The story goes that he asked my mother to name me Wilcox for my middle name to enable the family surname to continue. I carry the Wilcox mantle of a dynasty of interesting men and women who I have been writing about in this category for many months. There are no more members of the family with Wilcox in their name. Those remaining share the same Grandfather.
I knew my London Grandma for 33 years and was close to her. This was because she was always kind to me, as she was with all her grandchildren, and always spoke with me as an adult. She was big on advice, steering me and everyone in a direction that she thought was, or she thought should be, correct. Her upbringing must have been interesting. Always on the straight and narrow. She had a good sense of humour and I can recall her laughter in the room.
She was a frequent visitor to all her daughters houses and her stay in our household was always regarded as if being visited by royalty, something special.
In 1958 my father decided to leave Redhill in Surrey to become a Publican and hotelier in Bexhill on Sea, in Sussex. He transferred his business as a Turf Accountant to my eldest brother and took me and my two younger brothers to the York Hotel where we lived for two years. The second Christmas we were there, Grandma came to stay, and she was always on hand to give my Mother some help. By this stage of my life, I was reading anything I could lay my hands on. This was the heyday of the comic and magazine. One of my favourites was Boys Own Magazine which was always packed with interesting ‘how to’ type articles. I was reading at the time of my Grandmother’s visit, an article about how to make a family tree and research your ancestry. It entailed visiting Somerset House in Aldwych, off the Strand where all registration documents were held. For a small fee of 2 shillings and 6 pence, a search could be made, and a viewing of the original entry could be seen. I was discussing this with Grandma and wondering how I should go about it. Grandma replied that she did not think this was a good idea because “You don’t know what skeletons you might find”.
What Grandma was not wanting me to find, I have no idea. She was the child of wealth made by a family of cheese brokers and had an uncle who ran away from England to live in Australia, never to be heard of again, even though his Father, my Grandmothers Grandfather, left a significant sum of money for him in his will, never to be claimed by the runaway son. She also had a Grandmother, on her mother’s side, who was committed to an Asylum where she died in old age. Was this what she was trying to hide from me? Her husband Billy was one of 12 siblings, two who ran away from London to live in Wales where they changed their surnames and had interesting lives in the Coal Mining industry and bringing up families in the South Wales valley town of Tredegar. Was this also what she was trying to hide?
I suppose Somerset House was out of my reach at the age of 12 and so I never pursued that activity. I did, just 6 years later when I was working as a solicitor’s clerk, have the chance to do errands searching records there for the work that we did for the firm’s clients.
Grandma was a formidable woman when given responsibility. In the 1960’s when my Mother had to go to hospital for a kidney operation, Grandma came to look after the household. That would by my Father, older brother, me and two younger brothers. My older brother was not known for being tidy and would frequently leave wet towels lying around the bathroom. One morning he arrived to find a neatly written note on top of the towel rail, “Please do not scrunkle the towels”. For a day or two there was a sort of silent standoff between my brother and Grandma, but she had her way and there were no towels on the floor afterwards.
She was generous with her time and there are some photos from the 1960’s showing her and my youngest brother and his cousin of a similar age, on holiday at a holiday camp that she had taken them to.
When I left home at the age of 19 to live and work in a religious monastic community, I knew that it would surprise and confuse many people in the family, but they were generous with their views and never criticised me. I knew they were concerned for me and on one of my rare visits home to celebrate my 21st birthday, Grandma gave me a wrapped box and said conspiratorially to me, “There are many nice things like this in the outside world”. Inside was a clock. It was a small bedside clock made in the shape of an Aladdin’s lamp. I had no idea why she believed that I was hungering after stuff like that, which I was not, but I showed my gratitude by using it regularly for many years afterwards.
In the later 1970’s she became very ill and I was contacted in Kent where I was working to be told that she might not live long. Her daughter, my Aunt Rene, had arrived to look after her. She was in bed with what was probably a severe bout of flu. I drove up to see her thinking it was the last time that I would see her. I sat beside her, and she talked with me. At one point she said, “You know, I can remember your father before he could even drink a half pint of beer.” I still don’t understand why she said this to me. Was it because he had chosen to go into the pub business or because he enjoyed a drink? Perhaps it was her inner wisdom about life that meant something only to her.
Grandma went on to live a while longer. She agreed to move out of her house and move in with my Mother to be cared for until she died in 1980. She was 90 years old. We all, daughters and partners, 16 grandchildren and their families, went to the East Sussex Crematorium for her funeral. Later, in my Mother’s house, we gathered for a reading of her will. The daughters had equal shares in her estate, but to our amazement, each grandchild was gifted £500. For me this was a blessing because a year later, when I was trying to raise the deposit on a house, that £500 arrived in the post from the solicitor and so her business advice continued.
Why am I trying to remember her today? Two things have recently happened. The first was an unexpected email from the grandchild of one of my Grandma’s close friends. I wrote about this friend in a recent post, titled The Legendary Bennisters. This close friend’s relative asked me to find and send any photos of my grandmother to her to enable her to see if she appeared in pictures with her grandmother. She also put me right about a picture on my mother’s wall that I was very familiar with and which I am now advised was painted by this close friend’s daughter.
I have spent several hours searching through all my photo albums and can only find three that are worthy of sending on to my new correspondent.
Grace Wilcox sitting on the right. Her daughter, Rene is standing in the middle and my mother is on the left. Standing in the middle is my late brother Peter who might have been aged between 7 or 8 which dates this photo to about 1950/1952.
Grace Wilcox on the left of the picture standing next to my late sister, Janet, at a family wedding in1970.
Grace Wilcox at the same event in 1970
Grace Wilcox standing in the middle. On her left is her daughter Dorothy and on the right is my mother. 1970.
I find it strange that I have grown up having internalised so much of my London Grandma, with many fond memories of my time with her, that I can only find four decent pictures of her.
In a recent phone conversation with my brother’s wife she told me that she had discovered a couple of boxes of papers of his after he died. She had discovered a handwritten letter from Grandma to my Mother. It was written in 1942 and was a very personal letter in which she was explaining herself and her moral position in relation to something that had concerned her in a letter from my Mother. She expressed a lot of love and well-meaning in this letter. It was written in a style that can only confirm that even after her daughters had married, she was still in charge of their well-being and wanted them to know that.
London Grandma remains an enigma to me because she was the only remaining key to my personal ancestral past that I write about in this blog. Growing older, I acknowledge that my own grandchildren will probably not have much interest in what I research but at least I can have the opportunity to share it in cyberspace. It never fails to amaze me that many people read my posts, and it triggers them to make contact, and their contact brings these family ghosts alive for a short time more.