Emma Jane's sailor never came back. She marries Joe
Emma Jane's brother Harry and youngest sister Rosa May are at her wedding. She marries Joe Joyce at St Peter's Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, Lady Lane, Norwich in March 1883. As far as I know, she packed her bags and left Norfolk for good. That is why I have put the pictures above against a map of the very comprehensive rail network of the time.
Joe was living at 12, Hayman Street, Islington when he married Emma Jane. He was working as a manager in an isinglass and gelatine warehouse. Joe had, like the author Charles Dickens, gone out to work as a boy. Joe didn't work in a blacking factory, a job much hated by the young Dickens, but he had a job as an assistant cheesemonger at the age of 12. The last job I have a record of him doing is checking frozen meat imports on a wharf.
Joe was 2nd great grandfather Thomas and 2nd great grandmother Elizabeth Ashby Joyce's youngest child. Elizabeth was a nurse. She wrote poems for a hobby and transcribed them in best handwriting for commissions. Some of them have been kept. Emma Jane, the farmer's daughter from remote Tunstall, Norfolk, had married into a family with generations of antecedents from London and the Home Counties.
According to family records, the Joyces and their relatives were grooms, teachers, nurses and civil servants, mainly working in customs and excise. The last record I have of Joe's mother Elizabeth Joyce is in 1891. She is living in Croydon with her unmarried sister, Emma Ashby Davidson, a certified nurse.
Joe's 1883 address no longer exists. Hayman Street, Islington, was bombed on 29th July 1944.
I have put a picture of the chapel in Norwich, not particularly good quality, below. it has been demolished. As far as I know Lady Lane, no longer exists in Norwich either.
The following year, Joe and Emma's first child is born in Mildmay Park. I have put a picture of "Gertie", as she was known in the family, above. These little pictures, as I mentioned before, were printed to a size to fit in to letters sent between lovers and relatives. The picture above has a wad of padding underneath it, so it isn't damaged in the post. Emma's brother Harry named his first child Gertrude as well. Harry was farming at Burlingham St Edmund when his little girl Gertrude Emma died in 1883. The only other mention of Burlingham St Edmund in family records is that Emma Jane and Harry's grandfather James Skinner was born there.
Gertie, was born on 21st May 1884. Joe's mother, Elizabeth wrote a poem to celebrate the birth.
London was likely to have been a healthier place than Norwich in the 1880s, partly thanks to the campaigning of the reformer Edwin Chadwick for improved social and sanitary conditions. In view of her brother's death from typhoid 13 years previously at the Fever Hospital, Islington, Emma Jane made a brave move, when she went to live in the area, when she first married Joe.
The following year 1885, Gertie's brother Alfred was born in Stoke Newington where the small family had moved.
Stoke Newington had been established as non-conformist area. The non-conformist journalist and novelist Daniel Defoe ended his days there, in poverty, after what was probably a poor investment in land and property in Colchester, Essex.
From note books I have, Emma Jane's family were fond of humorous rhymes, riddles and ditties. Inevitably, her son Alfred joined the army at Westminster as a driver in 1816. Her son-in-law, my grandfather, enlisted as well in 1917. He was sent back from France because his eyesight was too poor. By that time, he had a wife, Gertie and two little girls to welcome him home. Had he not been sent back, perhaps my mother would not have been born. Rudyard Kipling's son, who also had poor eyesight, should have been rejected by the army. The fact he wasn't cost him his life, a tragedy his father, the author of Jungle Book, never recovered from.
I don't know when Jane Betsy moved to London to live with her oldest surviving daughter, Emma Jane. It may have been after her youngest daughter Rosa May is married or it could have been earlier.
Jane Betsy's grandchildren, Gertie and Albert probably listened to her stories of a lost life-style, especially when she started rambling on in what has been described on her death certificate as 'senile decay', which lasted some three years. What ideas did she put into their young minds?
I have remarked before that everyone in Joe and Emma's family worked as soon as they were old enough. Gertie as a telephone receptionist, first at a small exchange in Stamford Hill and later in London's first international exchange in Throckmorton Street, City of London. Alfred was a clerk in a warehouse and worked as a commercial traveller after the war. Emma Jane took in lodgers. One of these was Percy Rigden. He even moved with them, when they were able to afford to buy a house in Stamford Hill. There is a Rigden who witnesses Jane Betsy's will in 1893. He resides at Bethnal Green Workhouse. The photographer who took my grandparent's wedding photograph was also a Rigden.
My grandmother, having listened to her grandmother's ramblings about her life at Tunstall, checked it out by taking her family to visit Rookery Farm, Runham and Woodlands Farm at Stokesby. My aunt Nancy's pictures of the two farms show run down buildings and old fashioned farming methods. They feature the faithful farm hands, the Gowans, building hay ricks.
Records show close family and cousins who leave Norfolk and rural life, to go elsewhere or emigrate, are much healthier and longer lived than those who stay.
Alfred also emigrated with his wife and family to Australia in May 1929, perhaps inspired by his Skinner, Allard and Page cousins. He returned with all his family in August 1930.
Our visit to Tunstall in 1991 and reading and transcribing the letters and documents kept in the family, has unveiled a story with twists and turns I never expected.
A series of events, which would occur a four years after Emma Jane left Norfolk, are indicative of the tragic muddle into which the affairs of the cousins in Norfolk had fallen into. They did not have the benefit of records to find out what was going on. The strategies they employ to keep a roof over their heads and avoid the workhouse are indicative of this.
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