‘My Relations Were Women Of Steel’
Victor Nutt pays tribute to three female family members who overcame great challenges, including illegitimacy, tragedy and life in an industrial school. By Gail Dixon
Victor Nutt remembers visiting his gran, Sarah Wilmot, in New Eltham, South-East London, and watching her cooking up mash for the chickens. He can also see his dad and grandad playing cribbage at the dining-room table.
It’s a cosy picture of 1950s life, and there is little to hint at the struggles Sarah (née Manning) had to overcome from the earliest age. “Gran was born on 11 March 1884, in Bermondsey, London,” Victor says. “Her mother was Annie Zilpah
Manning. She was aged just 15 at the time and was unmarried.”
Annie was just a child herself, but like so many Victorians, she had to grow up quickly. “She was born in 1868 in Bermondsey to a carpenter Joseph Manning and his wife Sarah Rogers. At the age of 12, Annie worked as a nursemaid for the Badcock family in Rotherhithe. The children she cared for were aged eight, three, one and six weeks!”
Three years later, Annie gave birth to Sarah, Victor’s grandmother; unfortunately no father was listed on the birth certificate. Some stability came into Annie’s life in 1887, when she married ship’s stoker John
Frederick Myers. Later that year the couple had a daughter they named Annie Elizabeth.
Sadly the family was hit by heart-breaking tragedy only two years later when Annie Zilpah died of acute rheumatism, cardiac disease and thrombosis. She was just 20 years old. John was presumably at sea because the informant was Annie’s sister, Elizabeth Cannon.
“My grandmother Sarah was five when her mother died and Annie Elizabeth was not yet two. I’m not sure if Sarah even knew her mother, because she was living
mother ‘Gran was born in 1884. Her time’ Annie was aged just 15 at the
with her maternal grandmother in the 1891 and 1901 censuses. In the latter, they’re listed as mother and daughter.
“It’s my hunch that Sarah was taken in by her grandmother, and raised as her own. She was lucky to escape the baby-farm system.”
Sarah worked as a buttonhole sewer before marrying John Johnson Wilmot on Christmas Day in 1905. The couple went on to have seven children, including Victor’s mum Elsie.
So what happened to Sarah’s half-sister, Annie Elizabeth, who was left without a mother at the age of one? “No one in the family spoke of Annie Elizabeth,” Victor explains. “I only found
VICTOR NUTT lives in Bexleyheath, Kent. He can be contacted via
Please write to us at the address on page 6 or email wdytyaeditorial@ immediate.co.uk