Harry and Lizzie

N.B. The bare bones of this blog post originally appeared in 2009 as a 'Note' on Facebook, not long after I had begun researching my family’s story. The flesh has been over ten years in the making, and I’m still finding morsels all the time. Please do get in touch if you have any anecdotes or comments to add. 

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My great-grandfather, Harry Charles Clements was neither remarkable nor extraordinary, he was humble, gentle and down-to-earth; kindness personified, according to those who knew him. Likewise, his wife, my great-grandmother Elizabeth May Johnson was, despite her striking height, none too extraordinary herself. The memory of Granny and Grampy Clements, as they are always referred to, is one that always appears to be fragrant. Their daughter Phyllis would put two dinners in the panniers of her moped and zoom off to their home twice a day to feed them. Their grandchildren remember them with affection and snippets of their modest life appear to have been happy; those grandchildren may today - nearly a century since their simple country marriage re-wrote the history of our family - read this and learn more of their lives.  

Their lives, though long, rich with hard-won experience, was a rewarding one. I personally, love these two postcards of Lizzie and Harry, presumably taken for the occasion of their engagement or marriage. How evocative the photographs are, and how they bring Harry and Lizzie alive for a great-grandson destined never to know them. 

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Harry Charles Clements was born in Marylebone, London, in 1887. While the identity of his father is still unknown, contemporary hospital records from the time paint a vivid picture of his mother, Elizabeth Clements. Elizabeth was a twenty-eight year old spinster who, at the time of her son’s birth, resided in lodgings at 131 Cleveland Street in Fitzrovia, a short walk from Oxford Street. 

From these lodgings she practiced her modest trade; she was a laundress and ironer, and living in densely populated central London we can confidently assume she was not short of customers. Cleveland Street - not only famous today as the home of the BT Tower - is also infamous as the epicentre of the scandal that would shock polite society when it came to the fore in 1889 with its claims of a link between a homosexual brothel and leading society figures, including the Duke of Clarence. 

Though Elizabeth was an unmarried mother in Victorian society – so often regarded as scandalous, despite its relative frequency up and down the country – Elizabeth was, in many ways, very fortunate. London provided the perfect backdrop into which to face into obscurity; indeed, anonymity was its biggest advantage. In the teeming streets of England’s capital she was just another young woman. 

At twenty-eight, Elizabeth still had a realistic prospect of marriage and was obviously capable of bearing children. Yet, practically speaking, having a baby out of wedlock was nightmarish; a baby was an enormous hindrance to an unmarried woman as finding steady employment would have been problematic with a child to care for. 

Elizabeth was admitted to hospital late in the evening of Tuesday, July 19th, 1887, the sun having set barely an hour beforehand, and was seen to by Nurse Wilkie, a midwife with years of clinical experience behind her. At the time, local women would act as midwives, but evidence suggested that the lack of professional care endangered many newly born babies and their mothers, and formal training was introduced. Nurse Wilkie worked the night-shift, such as it was, at Queen Charlotte’s at the time of Harry’s birth.

The labour was thankfully short, and shortly after midnight on Wednesday, 20th July 1887, Elizabeth Clements was safely delivered of a baby boy. The child was born healthy, and weighed 7lbs 3oz. The child was entered into the baptism register of St Mark's Church in St John's Wood as Henry Charles Clements, on the Friday, aged two days - an apparent error by the Priest. Mother and baby left hospital on August 2nd, two full weeks since she had been admitted to hospital. This was appropriate, for contemporary medicine promoted a prolonged period of rest or 'lying-in' after even a straightforward pregnancy, and the name for the boy was entered into the discharge register of Queen Charlotte's as Harry Charles. Little did Elizabeth know that the name for her tiny son would persist until the 21st Century, with a grandson she would never meet bestowed the same name in the 1930s, and at least two of her great-great grandchildren bearing the name Harry. 

We will likely never know what the exact sequence of events were between the day Elizabeth left Queen Charlotte’s and the day of the 1891 Census in spring of that year, where amid the fresh greenery of springtime Harry appeared in one of the tiny whitewashed cottages in a ramshackle group of cottages called The Butts in the village of Aldbourne, Wiltshire, some eighty miles away from the commotion of the streets of Marylebone. The census that year shows Harry, not yet four, living with an elderly lady by the name of Hannah Dance, a nursemaid in her early seventies. 

Hannah was a Ramsbury girl, baptised in the parish church there. Her occupation, listed as 'nursemaid' on the 1891 Census, is a shrewd camouflage of her background. She herself was no stranger to illegitimacy: her daughter Sarah, born in 1843, was illegitimate. Hannah was an unmarried mother even before Elizabeth Clements was. In younger years she was the domestic servant to a local bachelor farmer. Upon his death she moved to Aldbourne and began to take in illegitimate children - sometimes temporarily, and sometimes long-term. Harry was not her first long-term charge. She had already seen at least three children to adulthood before Harry came into her care. 

Hannah died in 1893 at the age of seventy-two, at which time Harry passed into the care of Hannah's daughter Sarah, now the second Mrs. Henry Martin Palmer of Neale's Farm, South Street, Aldbourne. He attended school at Aldbourne, before and after school going to tend to the cows for his adoptive parents. 

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Elizabeth May Johnson was born in 1900 at Preston, small hamlet on the road between Ramsbury and Aldbourne. She was known in the family as Lizzie. Her father, Charles, was a gamekeeper, and not longer after she was born began working for the Woolland family of Baydon Manor, a position of relative prominence in the rural community. Yet, salaries being low and families being large, Charles brought his family up in relative poverty. With only three rooms in which a family of seven was shoehorned, and often going days without employment, at times, things looked bleak. 

The family moved frequently, constantly hunting for lower rent, yet still hardly keeping their heads above water. They eventually settled at Bayfields, Baydon, in around 1912, becoming next-door-neighbours to Albert Palmer, Harry's adoptive brother, who had taken on the tenancy of Fox Farm in Lambourn Woodlands, close to the site of the present-day Membury Services on the M4 motorway. Harry had moved in with Albert and his young wife Florence, working on the farm with the horses as a carter.

When the First World War came, an ankle injury - possibly sustained during a game of football playing for Aldbourne village - meant that Harry did not serve. He instead commenced employment at the Wiltshire County Lunatic Asylum, a bleak place on the outskirts of the small market town of Devizes. His employment there commenced in the spring of 1915, and lasted for three years until November 1918, shortly after the Armistice was signed.

By the time that war ended and Harry returned to Fox Farm, the world he left behind at Fox Farm had changed. Both Albert and Florence, and Johnson family next door at Bayfields were even more numerous, and particularly striking was the fact that Mr Johnson's daughters - Ada, Lizzie, Martha and Vera - were now young women, no longer heading over to the village school in Baydon but helping their mother at home or out in service. 

Lizzie, the second daughter and thirteen years Harry's junior, must have caught his eye as they married in at the Register Office at Ramsbury in March 1921 and moved to Upper Denford, a remote hamlet to the east of Hungerford. They were to be joined almost exactly nine months later by a daughter who they named Olive Elizabeth. Phyllis Maud and Jean Mary followed, and the three girls were baptised in the ostentatious but underused church at Denford. 

Their daughters began to attend school at Hungerford Newtown before the family moved east to Pangbourne in around 1929. There they were joined by Harry Charles in 1930 and Iris Rosemary in 1935. Harry was nearly fifty when Iris was born, and her name was a reflection of their love of gardening. It was a perfect family unit of a mother and father, four daughters and a son, whom Harry and Lizzie doted heavily upon.

Harry then secured a job on the River Thames in Berkshire in the small village of Lower Basildon, a few miles west of Pangbourne. The family moved from Pangbourne to 9, Lower Basildon, a mock-Tudor home built in the 1860s for estate workers on the Pangbourne-Wallingford road. This was to become their home for the remainder of their married life. 

Their life was humdrum, though some family stories persist which provide colour to their lives. For example, a message from a local Air Raid Precaution (ARP) warden just after 9.30pm on the evening of September 24th 1940 would change their lives. 

The message was to the effect that a high explosive bomb had exploded at Bennett’s Wood, Streatley, around a mile west of Lower Basildon village. This message was followed by a second scarcely fifteen minutes later, which stated that ‘an unexploded time bomb had fallen 50 yards south-east of the Crown Inn, Lower Basildon.’ The bomb landed just outside the back door of Harry and Lizzie's home. They were in the sitting-room listening to the radio at the time. Clements told The Reading Mercury:

The falling of the bomb made quite enough noise for us. I rushed to the back door, and found the huge thing sticking in the garden not more than three yards away. [...] When the military arrived we were all cleared out of our houses, and we were very thankful when we knew the next day that it had been moved, although the explosion did considerable damage to our houses. Our windows were smashed, doors were damaged, tiles showered from the roof, and plaster fell for the ceilings. But we can put up with these minor things all right. We consider ourselves jolly lucky to be alive.”

Measuring around seven feet in length and weighing ‘over a ton', remarkably the bomb only managed to shatter some nearby windows and sever a water main to the labourer’s cottage. Under the instruction of a Naval Officer who arrived to deal with the bomb, it was taken uphill to a field behind the cottage to be detonated. The explosion was ‘much more violent than the Naval Officer had expected’, causing damage to property across the village.  The Reading Mercury cast the incident in a positive light in order to boost morale, downplaying the gravity of the situation and the possible repercussions had the bomb detonated upon impact. Writing in 2012, Harry and Lizzie's daughter Jean recalled that ‘Basildon, being small, not much went on. [...] As for the bomb, it was fun. The entire village had to go to Basildon Park for a few days.’ 

Harry and Lizzie's eldest daugher Olive, now in the Women's Land Army, struck up a romance with a Canadian soldier who was a Gunner in the Royal Artillery. His name was Harry Eugene Rivers, and they married at Lower Basildon church in 1941. They had a daughter, Leora Elizabeth, named for her grandmother, who was christened alongside her aunt Iris in the same church on 27th February 1944. Harry’s occupation is recorded here as a Farm Labourer, suggesting he was not involved in the Second World War. 

Phyllis was next to marry, and at Reading Register Office on 28th June 1946 she married Alwyn Arthur James Banks, known in the family as Jim. Jim was the third and youngest child of John Harry and Dorothy Agnes Banks, of ‘Trees,’ Lower Basildon. Jean Clements later married Fred Chidsey at Basildon church in 1948, and had three daughters. Harry Charles Jnr married Avril Webb in 1953 and had five children, and Iris married Freddie Wilkes in Pancras, London, in the same year. She had one son, born in Islington later in the year.

Harry passed away in 1979, aged ninety-two, at Battle Hospital in Reading. Elizabeth died at home three years later, on her eighty-third birthday, 1st May 1983. Their ashes are scattered at the Henley Road Crematorium in Reading.