In the 1860s, Jane Betsy (above) and her husband James Pollard Skinner hosted mid-summer Methodist tea parties in Tunstall. They sent conveyances to Yarmouth and back, to pick up visitors and welcomed people from every walk of life. These occasions attracted between 200 and 400 visitors. The Norfolk News on 27th June 1865 reported: "The barn was tastefully decorated and every arrangement made to secure the comfort of those assembled. This with the kindly feeling displayed by the proprietor, who met the numerous visitors to the home-stead with a true old English welcome, and opened his grounds and gardens for promenade, materially assisted in promoting the satisfaction and pleasure experienced by all."
All that ceased when Jane Betsy was widowed. The tragedies in her life had a profound effect on her status and equilibrium. As a widow, rather than being a hostess, she may even have been considered to be a threat to society. Initially she stayed in her home with her surviving children and continued to run the farm until she made the decision to give it up. Letters her daughter Emma Jane kept suggest Jane Betsy is not well at the time she gave up the farm and they all left their home.
Once the family left Staithe Farm in Tunstall in 1875, the live stock, the farm equipment and almost everything belonging to Jane Betsy and her late husband's farm was auctioned on 11th September 1875. The auction included the bay and brown Norfolk horses he had specialised in rearing. Gipsy, Prince, Boxer, Beauty, Briton and Diamond and many other cherished horses were sold, fetching high prices in guineas. (Picture of Norfolk Roasters below)
Reading the list of items for auction, is almost like peeping into a dolls house model of the farmhouse at Tunstall. On the 8th of October 1875 bedsteads, mattresses, superior feather beds, blankets, counterpanes, mahogany chests of drawers, painted dressing tables, three mahogany dining tables, dining room chairs, sofa, easy chairs, bookcase, a chiffonier, Pembroke and other tables, sideboards, plate, engravings, linen, glass, china, books, a cottage pianoforte and harmonium by Alexandre, dairy, brewing and garden utensils, all went under the hammer at Tunstall.
The farm had been advertised to let in March 1875, by the trustees of her father, Stephen Bately's estate. It was offered for an eight year lease. This was taken up by nephew, James Thomas Skinner and his sisters, Alice and Eleanor, all from Thrigby. The Skinner cousins even revived the summer tea party event and entertained visitors with music, whilst they were there.
As I have mentioned before, Jane Betsy's Wesleyan Methodist faith sustained her through the tragedies, or "blows to the heart" in her words, which she suffered in 1870 and 1871. Late in 1875, after the auctions, when she had moved to Heigham Road, Norwich, with her five daughters, Jane Betsy suffered another tragedy. Her eldest child, daughter Henrietta Louise died, aged 31.
Jane Betsy's annuity from her father's estate, topped up by a lump sum from her late husband was not enough for them all to live on in Norwich. Emma Jane, Mary Ann and Laura all went out to work before they married and moved away from Norfolk. The last to marry was my great grandmother, Emma Jane, whose wedding with Joseph Joyce of Islington, in March 1883, was at St Peter's Wesleyan Chapel, Lady Lane, Norwich. Jane Betsy's youngest child, Rosa May was 18 when she and her brother Harry (34) attended Emma Jane's wedding.
By 1884 all Skinners had vacated the farm at Tunstall. Jane Betsy was in London, (where the photograph above was taken). Rosa May could have been with her. Or she may have chosen to stay with her other sisters, either above the stationers in Lowestoft with Mary Ann Stebbings, or at the ironmongers in Gloucester with Laura Sharpe.
In May 1886 Rosa May, had reached the age of majority. She no longer needed her mother's permission to marry. Something may have gone wrong. It could be that Rosa May made a wrong choice and is the "Miss Skinner" suing a Mr Bamber in a breach of promise to marry case. It was reported, in March 1887, in London and Home County newspapers and it caused the lawyers involved much amusement. In the resulting chancery case, the defendant, Mr Bamber was dispaupered. With a salary of 87 pounds per year from his clerk's job in a West End store, his claim of being a pauper and not able to afford to defend himself in the breach of promise case was dismissed. The judge even remarked that, although Miss Skinner claimed Mr Bamber had promised he was earning enough to keep her, it was more likely to be the case that he was hoping she would keep him.
Whether the case relates to Rosa May or not, the letter she wrote to the Norwich solicitors asking where the top up for her mother's annuity was, resulted in a summons for her and her mother as defendants in a chancery case. The plaintiffs, Sherwood William Page and Alfred Neave wanted to determine how to spend the money allocated by James Pollard Skinner's will.
As I have noted before, there is no evidence the chancery case, booked for 12th January 1888, was ever heard. Rosa May married Edward Dennis Ballinger at St Judes, Mildmay Park on 27th December 1887, with my great grandfather, Joseph Joyce as a witness. She moved to Ballinger's farm in Gloucester.
It is not clear who, if anyone, had spent the amount put aside, in accordance with James Pollard Skinner's will, to top up his widow's income from her father's (Bately) estate. Harry, whose trusteeship of his father's will, was taken over by his uncles Sherwood William Page and Alfred Neave, had originally been responsible for it.
The matter is resolved, as I have mentioned before, by taking Harry to court for the debt, I am assuming it is this debt, with Alfred Neave as his trustee. A series of notices in The London Gazette show this to have been paid by September 1888, and Alfred Neave is relieved of his trusteeship of it.
When Rosa May married and moved to Gloucester in 1887, all the Skinners, born at Tunstall, had left Norfolk, except Harry and his family. The once close family had split up completely.
Perhaps Jane Betsy felt safe in London. There, she was free from the stigma of a major change in lifestyle and suspicions from those who knew her, that the family tragedies and the upheaval of leaving her home and birth place had affected her mind.
This family split created factions. Jane Betsy kept papers and letters relating to Tunstall and she and Emma Jane made notes about her father Stephen Bately's family. It's as if they were trying to work out what happened. The notes could even be tell-tale signs of Jane Betsy's state of mind. Apart from the daughter she lived with, her supporters were Alfred Neave with his wife Emma (her sister), Worship and Rising solicitors of Great Yarmouth, her daughters, Mary Ann Stebbings, Laura Sharpe, Rosa May Ballinger, possibly her son Harry Skinner and her nephew Stephen Bately Skinner.
If there was an "other side," it included Sherwood William Page, George Frederick Durrant Preston, of Diver and Preston solicitors, Jane Betsy's sisters, Louisa Page and Eliza Charlotte Skinner, Rosa May's husband, Edward Dennis Ballinger, Alice Skinner (Ballinger's second wife), Eleanor Skinner (Sharpe) and Annie Skinner.
In 1901Alfred Neave the surviving Bately trustee, put the farm at Tunstall up for sale. That census year, Emma Jane was catering for two lodgers at Aden Grove. Her husband Joe and son Alfred were working long hours in warehouses and her daughter May Gertrude was working equally long hours as a telephone receptionist. I can imagine Jane Betsy fulfilling the 'household duties' noted by the enumerator. I can envisage her, flicking a duster around the crowded terraced house at 81 Aden Grove, Stoke Newington, and collecting up the antimacassars to send them to the laundry.'
Later in the 20th century, Jane Betsy's granddaughter, May Gertrude, had her own family. For holidays, they stayed with Stephen Bately Skinner's widow Rebecca, at Rookery Farm Runham and also Rebecca's sister in law, Ethel Fabb at Woodlands Farm Stokesby. They visited Harry Skinner's widow in Great Yarmouth. May Gertrude's brother Alfred and his family also stayed at the two farms. His daughter, my cousin Marian, told me on the phone recently, her father said he would like to have lived in Norfolk and was heart broken when Rebecca Fabb died in 1943.
Did Rosa May cut herself off from the family or did her husband, Edward Dennis Ballinger persuade her to have nothing to do with them? The evidence is that neither her mother, Jane Betsy, or her sister, Emma Jane, knew that Rosa May had died in 1893. Is this another indication of Jane Betsy's delicate state of mind? Did they keep the tragic news from her and from Emma Jane, in case she let the bad news slip to her mother? Or had Rosa May become estranged by then? Emma Jane was still ignorant of her death in 1910.
I am hoping to unravel more of this mystery by sourcing two bonds made by my 3rd great grandfather, Stephen Bately of Tunstall. One, made in 1814, was his marriage bond negating the necessity for banns and overriding potential objections to his second marriage to Harriet Crow, a minor, Wesleyan Methodist and 23 years his junior.
In the later bond he made in 1840, Stephen Bately was bounden to another 3rd great grandfather, James Skinner senior (farmer of Tunstall) and he was also bounden to a relative of his wife, Samuel Crow, gentleman of Southtown, Yarmouth.
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