Kate (4 page)

It was a tough existence and the family mixed with people who had no qualms about breaking the law, becoming close friends with one family in particular, the Hickmotts, who were no strangers to prison. A builder’s labourer and thief, Samuel Hickmott and his older brother Thomas gained notoriety in 1837 when they went on the run after being indicted for stealing three lambs from a Sussex farmer called Samuel Pix. They were finally arrested two years later at Brighton railway station, were tried at Maidstone Assizes in January 1840 and transported to Australia that April.

Samuel’s son Edward was, like his father before him, an inmate of the new Maidstone jail, which had been opened on the north of the town in 1819. After being released, he met the Goldsmith brothers on a building site where he was working as a bricklayer. He soon captured the heart of their sister Mary Ann, by now a pretty teenager. They tied the knot at Trinity Church, Maidstone, on 30 May 1842. She was just sixteen years old and he was five years her senior. The following year, she gave birth to the first of her six children, Mary Ann. Some years later, however, her husband was working on the other side of the world, in India, leaving her to bring up their children.

Sadly, John Goldsmith did not live to see any of his grandchildren grow up. After a long battle against stomach cancer, he died on 7 June 1847, at the age of 66. His wife Rebecca was at his bedside.

The following year, it was the turn of the couple’s youngest daughter, Sophia, to marry into the Hickmott family. She would have been deemed a scarlet woman in those days; the 21-year-old was living in sin with her brickmaker fiancé, Henry Hickmott, in Hackney, east London, and was heavily pregnant with their second child when they tied the knot at the parish church on 18 June 1848. Within a year, the couple followed in the footsteps of Henry’s convict father and emigrated to Australia with their two daughters, Emma, a toddler, and baby Eliza. They boarded the ship
Emily
at the Port of London on 4 May 1849 and arrived at Port Adelaide three months later on 8 August.

Perhaps John Goldsmith travelled to London to wave his sister off on her voyage. We know that before long the lure of the capital would prove too great. By the time John had turned 21, in 1848, he was the only one of his siblings still living at home. His two brothers, Charles and Richard, had made their way to London to find work as brickies and his sisters, Mary Ann and Sophia, had married and moved far away from home. To the impressionable young labourer, the bright lights beckoned. While his widowed mother Rebecca, who was now working as a charwoman, moved to nearby Tovil and took in a lodger, John moved up to London, taking a room in a house in Green Man’s Lane, Hounslow, close to his elder brothers.

In the capital, John met laundress Esther Jones, who was the daughter of a workmate and five years younger than him. They fell in love and got married on 23 September 1850, at the Parish Church of St John the Baptist in Hoxton in the East End of London. Both were illiterate and signed the register with a cross. They moved in with her parents. Within weeks of the wedding, Esther was pregnant with their first child and Kate’s great-great-grandfather, named John after his father and grandfather, was born at Esther’s parents’ home on 6 July 1851. There was to be a nine-year gap before they had another child, but then another five came along. Due to their expanding brood, they moved into their own home in Triangle Place, Islington, and their happiness seems to have been complete. The only sadness to blight their life together was the death of John’s mother, Rebecca, on 29 December 1869, as a result of bronchitis.

Although life expectancy was short, both John and Esther lived long enough to bring up all their children and see them leave home. They were still alive on 18 September 1882, when their eldest son John, a general labourer like his father and grandfather before him, tied the knot with his common-law wife Jane Dorset, four years his junior, at St Mary’s Church, Paddington, and for the birth of their daughter Eliza two years later. Sadly, however, on 19 December 1885, Esther succumbed to bronchitis at the age of 53. In 1888, the year after Victoria’s golden jubilee, Esther’s widower husband John died of a strangulated hernia at the age of 61.

So, unlike Kate’s other great-great-grandfather John Harrison, orphaned at the tender age of 14, John Goldsmith was 37 and married with three children when his father died. His third child – Kate’s great-grandfather – was born at home in Priory Road, Acton, on 6 November 1886, a cause of great celebration for the family. He was christened Stephen Charles but known as Charlie to his family. The couple went on to have another six children – in those days, large families were the norm among the working classes – although several died. The couple eventually settled in a run-down house in Featherstone Terrace, Southall, shortly before the turn of the century. It was there that they heard about the death of Queen Victoria on 22 January 1901, and the coronation of Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. Little did the Goldsmiths realise how different from the Victorian age the dawning twentieth century would be for them and their descendants.

Within a few years, Charlie had moved to Villier Street in Uxbridge, where he worked as a mechanic. It was there that he would meet his future wife, Edith, who lived with her family two streets away in Chiltern View Road. Although Edith had grown up with her father Benjamin, an ornamental plasterer, and mother Amelia in a large house in the village of Denham, Buckinghamshire, her family had fallen on hard times and been forced to sell up and move three miles to the less salubrious town of Uxbridge, known for its flour production and breweries. However, it seems they soon became part of the community, as Benjamin became a bell ringer at St Margaret’s Church in the heart of the town.

Their daughter Alice Tomlinson, now 97, and the only one of her siblings still alive, recalls her mother telling her about her background. ‘My mum was the baby of the family,’ she says. ‘She grew up in a big house in Denham. Her parents were both quite well off. Their families had had a baker’s shop and a butcher’s shop opposite one another and that’s how they came together. Somehow or other, along the line, they lost all their money. It was held in chancery and somebody signed the wrong documents or something.’

Edith was a tiny woman, under 5 ft tall and weighing 7 st. She was disfigured by a huge scar on her torso, which she had got during a narrow escape from death when she was a toddler. ‘Grandad used to light his cigar in his big oil stove in the hall of the big house where they lived,’ says Alice. ‘He would roll a piece of paper up and put it in the stove and light his cigar. Of course, when he went out, my mum copied. She had a go doing the same thing and nearly burned herself to death.’

Charlie and Edith got married at Uxbridge Register office on 27 March 1909. He was 22 years old and she was a year younger. The ceremony may have been brought forward because she was four months pregnant with their first child. They moved into their first home, just streets away from his parents, at 16 Spencer Street, Southall. Their eldest son, Stephen Charles, also nicknamed Charlie, was born on 20 August 1909, followed by Alice, nicknamed Minnie, in 1911, and Edith, known as Ede, in 1913.

However, within a year of Ede’s birth, war had broken out. Charlie signed up on 19 May 1915 and served in France with the Royal Fusiliers, initially in the trenches and afterwards in the cookhouse. He was one of Kitchener’s ‘shilling men’, having signed up in the wake of Secretary of State for War Lord Kitchener’s campaign for men between 19 and 30 to join the army. ‘My dad used to work on the coal carts when we were little,’ recalls Alice, ‘but then he went to war. All the lads joined up together to get the King’s shilling to get some beer.’

Just ten days after Charlie arrived in France, he discovered that his elder brother John, a private in the 3/8th battalion of the Middlesex Regiment, had been taken into South Western Hospital in Stockwell, which cared for people with fevers, smallpox and other infectious diseases. He died at the age of 30, one of 2,343 civilians and 1,136 soldiers who succumbed to cerebrospinal fever, or meningitis, in England and Wales during 1915 alone. There were numerous outbreaks of the disease during the Great War because of the overcrowded conditions experienced by young recruits in army barracks, depots, camps and billets.

The boys’ father was heartbroken. He soon lost the will to live, dying of exhaustion, melancholia and vascular disease at the age of 68, shortly after the war ended. The war spelled the end of another generation of the Goldsmith family, but it was the dawn of a new era for Kate’s great-grandparents Charlie and Edith and their children.

Chapter 4
The Goldsmiths 1918–53

It was just before Christmas 1918, six weeks after Armistice Day, and thousands of soldiers were still in France while their leaders wrangled over the terms of the peace. But others, more fortunate, were on their way home. Kate’s great-grandfather Private Charlie Goldsmith arrived back from France shortly after his 32nd birthday. There was great excitement at 57 Clarence Street, Southall. His wife Edith greeted him with their three small children, Charlie, nine, Alice, seven, and Ede, five. But there was also a new addition to the clan, one whom Charlie had yet to meet: six-month-old baby Annie, known as Hetty, who had been conceived when he was on leave.

After welcoming Charlie home, the young family joined the other local veterans and their children for a Christmas party and then a tea in the white-brick Southall Town Hall. Alice, now 97, still remembers the occasion. She recalls: ‘I was only a little girl but I remember him coming home in his soldier’s clothes. I remember the children’s party and celebrations. It was in a hall at the bottom of the station, which used to be the old billiard hall. We marched from there to the town hall for tea and a present from Father Christmas. I got a skipping rope.’

The joyous occasion was a welcome break for the family, who found life between the wars a constant struggle. While Southall is now a predominantly Asian area, in those days it was a white working-class suburb, providing labour for the sprawling brick factories, flour mills and chemical plants, the railway depots and engineering works that had sprung up around the Grand Junction Canal (once the main freight route between London and Birmingham), Brunel’s Great Western Railway and the Uxbridge Road. Unfortunately, life did not become much easier for the family when Charlie, who was nicknamed ‘Putty’ by his mates, returned home, as he was suffering from emphysema. He had to abandon his manual work shifting household coal in favour of factory work, landing a job at the Maypole Dairy, owned by a Danish margarine manufacturer. Opened in 1894, it had grown to become one of the largest such plants in the world and was serviced by a specially constructed railway siding and branch of the canal.

‘When my dad came home, he wasn’t really well,’ says Alice. ‘I don’t know whether he got emphysema from the trenches or from smoking. He never talked about the war or told us anything about it. But after he came home from France, he would always tell us, “Never volunteer for anything. You never know what you are letting yourself in for.” We were allowed to run free and do as we liked. We weren’t restricted or anything. But I suppose all children were like that then. Everybody was hard up and nobody had anything.’

Despite their straitened circumstances, Charlie and Edith had two more children, Joyce in 1924 and Kate’s grandfather Ronald on 25 April 1931. Both were born in Clarence Street, which in those days was one of the most impoverished streets in the neighbourhood. It was crammed with large working-class families who earned a living in the nearby factories and gasworks, working all the hours they could. The hardship brought with it a sense of community, with neighbours rallying round to look after the latchkey children, keeping a watchful eye over them as they played in the streets. The Goldsmiths’ neighbours included the family of jazz singer Cleo Laine, who was three and a half years older than Ronald. Her father, Alexander Campbell, was an itinerant labourer from Jamaica, who busked to make a living, while her mother, Minnie, ran a boarding house in the street, renting out rooms to Irish labourers.

By the time Ronald was born, his father had given up working at the factory and returned to manual work as a builder’s labourer. Alice, then 20, had already left home, having got married two years earlier to Bill Tomlinson, a Welsh miner who had moved to London and was employed at Rockwell Glassworks. ‘I left school at 14 and did various jobs in factories before marrying Bill when I was 18,’ says Alice. ‘We met in Southall Park. We were glad to get married and get away from home, really.’

Ronald was eight months old when his elder brother Charlie, then 22 years old and a master plasterer, married labourer’s daughter Emma Neal on Boxing Day 1931. The couple wed at the Parish Church of St John in Southall. ‘Charlie was a clever boy but remote,’ says Alice, who went to the wedding with her husband. ‘He couldn’t do wrong as far as my mother was concerned. She was one for the lads and spoiled both the boys. She idolised Ron and butter wouldn’t melt in Charlie’s mouth.

‘He learned to plaster as a child. My grandad Ben was an ornamental plasterer and worked in grand houses like osterley Park. He did all the cherubs and bunches of grapes and cornicing. He had a workshop where he used to make plaster casts. I remember playing in there as a child. He taught Charlie how to plaster right from when he started school. He could get out the tools and plaster a wall even when he was quite a tiny little boy. As he got older, he worked for the best local builder before he started working for himself. He did really well. He was the only man in Clarence Street who had a car. I think it cost him £300 brand new.

‘He had a posh wedding in a church with bridesmaids and then hired the Co-op Hall. Emma was always the heart and soul of the party. But she never had any children. I don’t know whether they couldn’t or didn’t want them. They were much in love, always together. They had a good life. They were always comfortably off and had a little bit of dosh.’