READER STORY
When Allan Palmer researched the family of his father’s first wife he discovered mystery, bigamy and two young boys sent overseas alone, he tells Claire Vaughan
Allan Palmer was inspired to explore a family mystery after watching WDYTYA
WDYTYA? Magazine reader Allan Palmer admits to having a slightly Middlesex-centric view of the world as he and both his parents were born there. So when he started researching his father’s first wife, Kate Arnold, and discovered she was born elsewhere he had to find out more. He was astonished at the tale that unfolded, one of abandonment, tragedy and courage in far-flung locations.
Allan, coincidentally, has something in common with actor Charles Dance: a father who was advancing in years at his birth. “When I was born in 1952 my father, George, was 64. Watching Charles talk about his father on Who Do You Think You Are?, my wife turned to me and said ‘that sounds familiar’.” Unlike the actor, though, Allan knew his father had been married before. “My father’s youngest son from his first marriage, Douglas, lived locally so we saw him occasionally.”
Snippets of Kate’s story filtered through from Douglas, who was nearly 40 years older than his half-brother. One thing stuck in Allan’s mind: “Douglas said he remembered a man in a big khaki coat with a rifle coming to see his mother in 1918.”
George died in 1965 when Allan was 13. “There wasn’t really a chance for me to ask him about the family. A couple of years before my mum died in 1991, I went through a box of old documents and photographs with her and made some notes, but I didn’t follow it up until 2004. The catalyst was the start of the WDYTYA? television series.”
Revisiting the documents, Allan came across Kate’s birth certificate. “She’d been born in Essex not far from Colchester. I was interested in when she’d got to Middlesex.” Her parents were recorded as Samuel Oliver Arnold and Agnes Alice (née Ashton).
Like Allan’s father George, Kate had been born in 1887. So he searched for her in the 1901 census. “The page she was on wasn’t laid out like the normal household – it was just a list of names.” He’d found her among the inmates of Colchester Workhouse. There were five other Arnold children in there too: Nellie (Ellen), Agnes, Thomas, Oliver and Beatrix. He searched for their parents but couldn’t find them. “Beatrix, the youngest of the siblings was born in 1896, so I presumed that between 1896 and 1901 something had happened to the family.” But what?
To solve this mystery, Allan started with some background research into Samuel and Agnes. Samuel, he discovered, was a local labourer. But Agnes was more elusive. “I tried to find her in records for the Essex area, then broadened the search to England but still no joy. So I took the filters off and found an Agnes Alice Ashton born in 1865 in Bangalore, East Indies. What was her family doing in India? It was very exciting.”
Allan consulted the India Office records at the British Library (now available on findmypast. co.uk) and found Agnes’s baptism in February 1865, listing her father as Henry William Ashton an infantryman in the 66th Regiment of Foot. Now Allan knew why the family had been in India and, knowing his regiment, he could target his research.
“I contacted the Rifles (Berkshire and Wiltshire) museum in Salisbury, which the 66th Regiment had been amalgamated into. They supplied me with a copy of his service record. William (he seems to have used his middle name) had initially been stationed at Colchester Barracks, but in 1863 he was sent to join the rest of the regiment stationed in India. His wife Diana, also from Colchester, went with him.” According to the regimental timeline on the museum’s website ( thewardrobe.org.uk), a month after Agnes was born, they were recalled to England.
The timelines revealed what William’s regiment were doing out in India. In
He was astonished at the tale that unfolded, one of abandonment, tragedy and courage
1857, they’d been involved in putting down the Indian Rebellion and later they were stationed in Ireland and the Channel Islands before being posted back to India in 1870 for another 10 years, during which time the couple had two more children. “At the beginning of 1880, William got a medical discharge for varicose veins.”
This was lucky as soon after, the regiment was sent to fight in the Afghan Wars. “In 1880, the 66th Regiment suffered heavy losses in an engagement with the Afghans,” says Allan. By the time of the 1881 census, the family was living in Fordham, near Colchester, and William was recorded as a Chelsea Pensioner.
Agnes and Samuel married in 1887 – three-and-a-half weeks after Kate was born. Allan also uncovered something that happened to Agnes before the marriage that would prove important later. “Two years before, she’d given birth to a son, George, But there’s no father’s name on the birth certificate. In the 1891 census, George was living with Agnes and Samuel and their children as an Arnold.”
The route to the workhouse
But try as he might, Allan couldn’t find out why the six Arnold children (except George) had ended up in the workhouse and what had happened to their parents. “Essex Record Office didn’t have admissions registers for Colchester Workhouse, so I haven’t been able to find out when or why they were admitted.” Then he had a breakthrough.
“On Ancestry, I found a public member tree that included Agnes. It showed that she married (probably bigamously) an Adam Robertson in 1897, the year after her last child was born in Colchester. I think they married in London – although I haven’t yet tracked down the marriage certificate – but the family tree showed Adam was from Lanarkshire. The couple had a daughter the following year in London, but by 1901 they were back in Scotland.” Allan managed to locate Agnes in the 1901 Scottish census in Coatbridge near Glasgow. “Her birthplace was listed as East Indies, so I knew I had the right person.” Her oldest son, George, was also living with them.
And Samuel? “I’ve found a possible death for him in 1945 although I haven’t been able to prove it yet.”
These discoveries mean either Agnes or Samuel deposited Kate and their other young children in the workhouse then left to start new lives. It’s easy to judge from a distance, to condemn parents that abandon their children, but as Allan says: “You just don’t know what the circumstances were. Perhaps work dried up and they couldn’t afford to keep them.”
So what happened to Kate’s siblings? The 1911 census showed that Ellen married Frederick Hartley, the son of a local farmer, while Agnes junior and Beatrix were both in domestic service. “Douglas told me that he thought Thomas and Oliver were sent to Canada to work on farms by Dr Barnardo.
“I contacted Barnardo’s and they sent me some information and a photograph,” Allan says. “I also did some internet searches and learnt about Home Children: orphans sent by Barnardo’s and other charitable organisations to work as labourers and domestics in the colonies. Barnardo’s records showed that the two boys had been transferred from the workhouse to Barnardo’s in Stepney Causeway, London, in February 1908 and three months later they were sent to Canada.” The passenger lists for the SS Dominion on ancestry.co.uk record the Arnold boys with a party of 75 Barnardo’s children. “The SS Dominion left Liverpool on 21 May 1908 and arrived in Canada on 31 May 1908.”
Help online
That could have been the end of the line for Allan but, determined to find out what happened to Thomas and Oliver, he posted a message on a web forum asking for help.
The tactic worked. Someone with access to the placement records in Canada responded and Allan was able to pick up the Arnolds’ trail once more. “The boys were placed on separate farms in Ontario. But it appears from the addresses that they were relatively close so they probably had contact. They were indentured until they turned 16. In the 1911 Canadian census, I found them working at the same farm, Thomas having completed his indenture, is listed as a labourer, while Oliver is still recorded as a Home Boy.”
Either Agnes or Samuel deposited their young children in the workhouse
“Douglas had told me that Oliver was killed in the First World War. I searched on the Canadian National Archives website to see if I could find his service records.” There Allan found the boys’ attestation papers and other documents. “They enlisted together (as shown by their consecutive regimental numbers) in the 116th Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1915 in Regina, Saskatchewan. It must be at least 300 miles or so from Ontario to Saskatchewan, so at some point after Oliver had completed his service, they did a bit of travelling.”
His service records confirm that Oliver was killed in August 1917 in France aged just 21. The regimental diaries reveal that, at the time, the 116th Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force was in Northern France engaged in the strangely named Battle of Hill 70, to capture a strategic vantage point above the heavily bombarded city of Lens. “There seems to have been a large number of casualties on the Canadian side, one of which was Oliver,” says Allan. Trawling the handwritten service documents, he spotted a comment among Thomas’s records saying that the same month his brother died Thomas was ‘almost completely buried by a shell’. “He went on to spend several periods in hospital over the next year and was invalided back to the UK,” explains Allan. “One note says he was taken ill in Glasgow and admitted to hospital there. I wonder if he knew his mother was living nearby.”
Thomas survived his injuries and was back in England in 1918. “I found a marriage certificate for him. He married a girl in Middlesex in December 1918.” He also, of course, came to see his sister Kate – it’s likely he was the man in the khaki coat that Douglas remembered seeing. “I thought it was quite poignant that Thomas had come back to see his sister at the end of the war. Looking back, when I found the two boys’ enlistment papers, they’d listed their next of kin as Mrs George Palmer [Kate] of London, England, so even though they were separated by the Atlantic Ocean, they knew their sister had married my father.”
In 1919, Thomas returned to Canada and his wife followed him a few months later. “I found them in the 1921 Canadian census living in Toronto with a three-month old daughter. They’d named her Olive R,” a tribute to the younger brother he’d gone through so much with.
Allan is amazed by Thomas’s tenacity: “He was sent to the workhouse at an early age, then to Canada, survived the First World War, terrible injury and losing the brother he was so close to, but then moved back to Canada, settled down and started a family.” It’s perhaps telling that he chose to settle in Canada.
Despite the fact that it wasn’t his blood relatives he was researching, Allan still felt a bond with them. “It wasn’t really a case of differentiating between them being blood or not, they were still involved in my ancestry through my father.” And with India, Ireland, the Channel Islands, France and Canada all part of their story, they were anything but Middlesex-centric…