My Great Aunt Sarah, was born in the year that the Penny Farthing Bicycle was invented and died in the year that the first man walked on the moon. She lived to celebrate her 97th birthday, but sadly although she lived just up the road from my Grandad Robert Bell, her younger brother, I don’t remember ever having met her.
She was born at Blaco Hill Cottages, Mattersey, on 1 August 1871 and christened at All Saints Church, Mattersey, on 3 December 1871.
In the 1881 census she’s one of five children still living at home at Blaco Hill Cottages. Aged 9, she’s a ‘scholar’, but her brother Ernest, 11, has already started work as an agricultural labourer.
Treswell
By the age of 19, in 1891, she has gone into service and she’s working as housemaid for the Rev. Samuel Stott and his family at Treswell, east of Retford, about ten miles from Blaco Hill.
The Church of St John the Baptist, Treswell was described in Kelly’s 1881 Directory as ‘an ancient structure with a lofty embattled tower. About 9 years ago it underwent a complete restoration. The interior is filled up with open seats’.
‘The Rectory is a large handsome brick mansion near the church … erected about 7 years ago’.
The Directory gave the value of living in 1881 as £254.
Lound Hall
Ten years later, at about the time of the photograph, later she’s back near her parents working as cook at Lound Hall.
Highfield Farm
In the second quarter of 1904 she married John Edward Porter, a farm foreman from Newton, Lincolnshire. Sarah was 32 years old, John 31.
The 1911 census shows that John had a son, Charles, aged 9, and that in their first six years of marriage, John and Sarah had has three children, all of them named after Sarah’s siblings: Helena Dora Porter, aged 5, Ernest Walter, 2, and William Henry aged 3 months.
I’m now wondering if the photograph of the Bells of Blaco Hill that I’m researching might have been taken at Highfield Farm, where John was foreman to W. E. Fielding. If so could that be a very young Charley Porter peering round the lace curtains?
By 1921 John’s son ‘Charley’, now 19 years old, has taken a job as ‘horseman’ at Highfield Farm.
Dora, ‘Earnest’ and Harry are all still in full time education.
Sarah and John are still living at the farm but with no children still at home in the 1939 survey.
Sarah Brown Porter died on the 13th March 1969.
Link
Highfield House, Lound, Grade II listing at Historic England