A smelter, a cook, a domestic servant and a chauffeur. Joseph, Hannah, James and Helena – my great uncles and aunts – stand alongside my Grandad Robert on the back row of the c.1904 photograph of the Bell family of Lound, near Retford, Nottinghamshire, which I’m currently researching.
The handwriting that I’ve added is that of the 1891 census enumerator for Lound, John Wragg, 54, Certificated Teacher at the School House, Sutton-cum-Lound Church of England School.
Helena ‘Nellie’ Bell
Helena, born 16 December 1872, was Nellie to her family perhaps because her mother, bottom left in this vignette, had the same name.
She was baptised on Sunday, 2 February 1873, at All Saints Church, Mattersey. On this occasion her mother’s name is given as ‘Ellen’ rather than Helena.
Aged 18, Nellie – Helena junior – worked as a domestic servant for Francis D. Sandbach, a Wesleyan Minister, at 17 Heaton Road in Withington, Lancashire.
Robert Snell
In 1895 Nellie, aged 22, married Robert Snell, also 22, a miner from Harthill, her mother’s home town. They were married at St Bartholomew’s Church, Sutton-cum-Lound.
Witnesses were Helena’s sister Sarah Brown Bell and her brother George William Bell.
Sixteen years later, living in Harthill, the couple had five children: Doris Mary, 12, Helena Annie, 7, Lucy Rebecca, 5, Robert, 3, and James Eric, 1. There had been another child who died.
Robert senior was a ‘Coal Miner,’ a ‘Hewer at Coal Face’.
In the 1939 survey Robert has retired and he and Helena are living at 78 Doctor Lane. Robert junior, age 31, is still living at home and working as an ‘Assistant School Master’ and James Eric, age 29, is a brick layer. Both sons had volunteered as air raid wardens.
Robert Snell senior died in 1943, Nellie in April 1960.
Jim Bell
Jim was born 9 January 1882.
In 1901, aged 19, he’s working as a groom and lodging with coachman John T. Beedham at Maltby, eleven miles north east of Lound. Also lodging there is William Ginnever, 16, footman. Two of his next door neighbours were horsebreakers.
In 1911, aged 29, he’s moved to Treeton, a mining village east of Sheffield and he’s made the transition from working with horses to working as a chauffeur but he is boarding with a man who works with horses: Frederick C. Royle, who is a ‘horsekeeper underground’ at a nearby colliery.
Chauffer at Irnham Hall
In the summer of 1914 James married Elizabeth Tarleton.
In 1921 Jim was chauffeur to mine owner Sir Frederick John Jones, baronet, at Irnham Hall, near Grantham, Lincolnshire. Elizabeth and James had a son Sydney James Bell, aged 5.
In 1939 Jim is still the chauffeur at Irnham and he and Elizabeth have three children still at home: Sydney, now aged 23, is a bricklayer’s labourer but also an ‘experienced car driver’, Clifford, 15, is a blacksmith’s labourer while Majorie, 12, is still at school.
James died on 21 January 1961 at the Royal Infirmary, Sheffield. His son Sydney James Bell, toolroom fitter, was granted probate (‘Effects £506 9s. 1d.’, which would be about £9500 in today’s values).
Hannah Bell
Hannah was born on 5 July 1886 and baptised at All Saint’s church, Lound, on 1 August 1886.
On Sunday 31 March 1901, the date of the census, the 14 year old Hannah was visiting her sister Nellie – now Mrs Helena Snell – in Harthill.
In her mid-twenties Hannah was cook to the family of Harry FitzMarina and Amy Louise Huntsman at Lound Hall, where her elder sister Sarah had previously worked as cook. Harry was a director of coal and steel companies.
She married Cecil Porter from Newton, Lincolnshire, in the second quarter of 1914.
On Sunday 19 June 1921 we get a snapshot of life in the Porter household in the census. Cecil, aged 33 and Hannah, 34, have a daughter, Muriel Eleanor, 7, and a son, Harold John, 5. They have two visitors: Hannah’s 75 year old mother Helena, and her niece Annie Helena Bell.
Annie Helena is 12 years 11 months old and was born in Castleford, Yorkshire, but the survey notes that her mother is dead (see below for more on Annie).
Cecil is working as a farm labourer for Mr Lees, a farmer, at what appears to be ‘Liln’, Retford.
Hannah died 1 February 1969.
Joseph Bell
Joseph was born 2 July 1883.
In 1901, aged 17, he was working as a waggoner on a farm at Stokeham, Nottinghamshire.
In the 1921 census, aged 37, he was taking time off his job as a labourer at the Redbourne Hill Company Steelworks in Scunthorpe to visit his sister, Mrs Sarah Porter, and family in Lound.
On 28 July 1928 Joseph, 44, married Florence Pratt, 34, from Retford, the daughter of a soldier. Witnesses were John Joseph Pratt and George Martin and Joseph’s niece Lucy Rebecca Snell.
Florence was a ‘spinster’ but Joseph was a widower. I’ve so far been unable to track down his first wife and I’ve been unable to find him in the 1911 census.
Joseph had left the steelworks and was now, like his brother James, working as a chauffeur.
In 1939 he’d returned to Scunthorpe and is living in lodgings at 68 Old Crosby, close to the steelworks where he works as a smelter. Florence is doing ‘unpaid domestic duties’ at The Haven, South Leverton, east of Retford and 25 miles south of her husband in Scunthorpe.
Joseph died 17 June 1970.
Joseph, the missing years
What happened to Joseph between being a waggoner on the farm at Stokeham, aged 13, and taking time off from the steelworks at Scunthorpe twenty years later to visit his sister, Sarah Brown Porter, at Highfield Farm in Lound?
Who was his first wife?
I’ve since come across his census return from 1911.
Aged 27, he was living at 40 Parkgate Road, Parkgate, Rotherham, with his wife Clara, 23, and their daughter ‘Annie Heleanon’ (Joseph misspelt Helena).
He was a general labourer at an iron and steelworks.
Marriage
Joseph had married Clara Ward who was born in Parkgate on Boxing Day 1907, at the parish church.
Joseph’s sister Hannah was one of the witnesses.
Clara’s late father John Ludlam Ward (1852-1893) had been a miner. Her mother Harriet Anna Rush was apparently born in ‘Norfolk, Sth Peak’.
Annie Helena was born six months later on 27 July 1908.