Polly's tale: or, who needs a parson?

 

I have been grumbling a tad about the cartes de visite I have been pulling out of the past for investigation. So many Indian Army types, so many landed gentry, so many moneyed businessmen ..

Well today I got my come-uppance. A more 'ordinary' lady than this one I could not I have fallen on. Families of manual labourers, cowmen, domestic servants ..

So. 

You know that old canard about the morality of the working classes?  Well, if morality equivates things like marriage vows, this lady is more or less proof of the contrary.

She is labelled on the verso as Polly Whicheloe, so finding her wasn't very hard. Born 5 Sydenham Crescent, Croydon 29 March 1883. Father George Whichelo from Abingdon, Yorks, labourer and Miss Sarah Weeks, fifth daughter of Charles (labourer) and Charlotte Weeks of Fareham ...  No, they weren't married. But they had five or six children together as they moved from Croydon to Guildford to Erith to Wallingford  ...

Like mother, like daughter. Polly Weeks or Whichelo duly became a domestic servant, and age 26 she bore an illegitimate daughter to a labourer by name George Alfred English. Edith May was christened with her mother's surname, and died as an infant. Three other children were born before the couple decided to regularise their relationship. Another followed, before George went to war. He didn't return.

Polly remarried a labouring man by the name of John Chivers. I fear he was the same John Chivers of Godstone who had been convicted at age 17 of comitting an 'abominable act' with a mare, and jailed for 12 months. Now he was, at age 50, more sage. But Polly didn't have him for long. Four years, and she buried a second husband.

Polly lost her son in the second war, and can be seen in 1939 living with her two then unmarried daughters, the future Mrs Gladys Maud Pritchard (b 4 January 1914; d Wrexham 1987) and Dora Elizabeth Violet English (b 10 November 1909; d 1979).  Both domestic servants.

Polly died in South Shields in 1970.

This photo is inscribed "Aunt Polly Whicheloe", so I guess it belonged to a child of one of Polly's siblings ... Rose, Joseph, Thomas, Alice ....  But Wichelo?  Not English?  She doesn't look to be under 26 ... but maybe.  Who knows.  I guess she keeps some of her secrets.