Many thanks to Forces War Records for sharing the love letter that revealed more than a picture ever could!

After being hidden for nearly 65 years, one of the First World War’s most touching and poignant love stories was unravelled by Forces War Records Tom Bennington. The letter, sent in by a member, held fascinating answers to one couple’s quest to uncover their family history. When Tom first heard about the letter, he said: “In spite of being a professional military historian, scouring records every day, I hadn’t been overly touched by the emotion of the war before, but on reading Frederick’s heartfelt words, I found myself empathising deeply with these men.  They were everyday young chaps with a life and loved ones, a family, wife, girlfriend, children, mother and father all left behind at home.”

For some months, Roger Potts and is wife Jenny Fenton, had been trying to trace the story of his grandfather, Frederick Swannell.  Although they had scant details about his Great War; just his name and army number, there was one additional item they felt might yield some clues.  It was a fragile and fading love letter written by the lance corporal to his beloved wife Ellen (Nell).  A letter that says so much more than a photograph ever could.

Roger’s mother had chanced upon it following the 98 year old widow’s death in 1981.  She’d found it tucked away in Nell’s handbag. The grieving widow had carried it with her every single day after Frederick’s tragic death in the trenches in 1917. So touched were the family with this discovery that they placed the original alongside Nell in her sealed coffin, but kept a copy as a keepsake and reference.
​
The beautifully scripted letter spoke volumes about the personal cost of the war and the terrible physical and mental toll of trench warfare.  This was a war that soldiers had grown sick of not simply from the terrifying bombardments, but the stench, mud and disease. Lance Corporal Swannell was clearly most fearful that he would never return home to his adored wife and five small children.

Frederick and Nell had a son also named Frederick and four small daughters: Ellen, twins Elizabeth and Emily, and Charlotte.  Frederick Swannell Junior was known to live with his grandparents due to a busy home life and the logistics of looking after four girls of a similar age.

From the few factual details contained within the letter of name, rank and service number, FWR researcher Tom Bennington was able to trawl the website’s documents and data and fill in the story’s gaps: Frederick’s age at death, where he died and further detail about his unit.  And there was more: he revealed that Lance Corporal Swannell, a French polisher in civilian life, had become part of the 6th Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division who defended Oppy Wood during the Battle of Arleux, France (April and May 1917).

He explained that this heavily strategic battle began in a snowstorm and was soon known as the greatest killing battle of the war, with a daily casualty rate of 4,076.

On 28 April 1917, eight days into the military operation, and aged just 35, Frederick was declared missing, presumed killed.  In total, 158,000 British and Commonwealth troops were injured or killed during the battle, when trying to break through the German defences.

Tom was also able to let Roger and Jenny know that Frederick is remembered at the Arras memorial, in the Faubourg-d'Amiens Cemetery – and that his name was recorded on the roll of honour in bay seven of the Memorial in the Pas de Calais.  The monument commemorates 34,785 United Kingdom, South African and New Zealand soldiers, with no known grave; all of whom died in the Arras sector between spring 1916 and 7 August 1918.
​
Jenny commented: “Every time my husband and I read Frederick’s letter it brings a lump to our throats and tears to our eyes.  It vividly illustrates the horror of his life at the front and of his desperate wish to be home with his young family.

“We want to share the story so people are aware of the terrible times these brave young men lived through.”

Transcription of the letter:

Keep an eye open for more stories from the trenches and on Valentine's Day for details of the special 25% discount offer on full membership!

I came across Matilda Stoaling in my Rowe family searches around her mother-in-law Catharine Rowe. Normally when sketching out the story of a distant-in-law I would just make a note of their or their parents’ professions and location and return to the person featured in the blog post, but the myriad of step-parents involved here – and the hardships some of them must have endured – made me want to commemorate them this way.

So, to start with Matilda.  She was born c1866 in the old Saxon town of Wiveliscombe, Somerset where her family had lived for at least 2 generations. Wiveliscombe was a market town and when Matilda was growing up there were 3,000 people living there. The National Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland (1868) reported “The town is lighted with gas, and contains a town hall, police station, dispensary, reading-rooms, and branch bank. Here is situated the largest brewery in the W. of England.” and in 1870-72, John Marius Wilson’s Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales described a weekly market on Tuesday, great markets on the last Tuesday of Feb. and July, and fairs on 12 May and 25 Sept.”

Her father John Stoaling had grown up a pauper – his mother was recorded as a pauper in both the 1841 and 1851 censuses – but by March 1851 he had found employment as an agricultural labourer. In late 1851 he married a widow called Maria.

Maria’s background:
Maria Hall was the daughter of an agricultural labourer called John Hall and was born in Wiveliscombe. She had married Henry Milford in summer 1845, he aged 23 and she 28.  Together they had two daughters, Mary Ann and Sarah Jane, within four years before he died: she was widowed by the March 1851 census.  It appears Sarah Jane was born deaf and dumb, in later life she was referred to as an imbecile.

Maria married John c November 1851. I think that young Mary Ann must have died in childhood; her daughter Sarah lived with them. Maria and John had at least four children together before the 1861 census: Frank, Maria, Mary and Henry.

In April 1861 the family was living next to the Mason’s Arms in Wiveliscombe, and John was working as a brewer’s labourer, maybe in Wiveliscombe’s large brewery. Maria’s 80-year-old agricultural labourer ‘idiotic’ father was living with them, as was her daughter Sarah. In 1866 Maria gave birth to their final known child and my link to this family, Matilda.

In April 1871 they were still in the same street, and by then John was working as a travelling hawker. Deaf-and-dumb Sarah Milford was still living with them and working as a charwoman, and they had taken in a couple of lodgers.

Maria died in 1875 when John was 50 years old and young Matilda was just 9.  She was without a mother figure for a couple of years until her father re-married in 1877.

Matilda’s new step-mother was called Eliza and was a widow in her mid-30s with a young daughter of her own when she married John Stoaling.

Eliza’s background:

Eliza Heyward had been born in the amazingly-named Huish Champflower in Somerset, England, in autumn 1839. The name of this ancient village comes from a combination of ‘hiwisc’, the Saxon word for homestead, and the name of Thomas de Champflower, a 12C Norman lord of the manor.  It was just under 3 miles from Wivelscombe and stood on the River Tone in an area with many mines owned by the Ebbw Vale Iron Company.

She had an older brother and two sisters, but her agricultural labourer mother Elizabeth was widowed before Eliza was two years old.

Eliza married at the age of 20, in 1860.  Her first husband, John Weech, was a 49-year-old farmer of 8 acres and they lived together in the hamlet of Langley Marsh, a mile north of Wiveliscombe, Somerset where the Norman church was dedicated to St Andrew and the local pub was the Three Horseshoes. John’s 86-year-0ld widowed father Robert Weech, who’d also been a farmer, lived with them. John and Robert had been farming in Langley 20 years before, before John’s mother died, and they’d had then a female servant then called Fanny Reidland.

There was no servant recorded in 1861.  Probably times were hard; after John died in 1969 poor Eliza must have been extremely down on her luck as the 1871 census finds her in Wellington workhouse. Within a few months she became pregnant and had a daughter in spring 1872 whom she named Mary Ellen Weech.

However a few years later at the age of 35 she met John Stoaling and they married in summer 1877.  He too was older than her although records are inconsistent, I think he would have been approx 54 when they married.

John and Eliza’s first child together, a son called Frank, was born in 1879.

Sarah’s story:

Deaf-and-dumb Sarah, Matilda’s half sister, had moved out from her stepfather John’s home at some point before the 1881 census.  In that year she was living alone in Wiveliscombe and still working as a charwoman.  By April 1891 she was the general servant of a local woman of independent means called Helen Lutley, a spirit-merchant’s daughter, who also had a long-time servant/cook called Betsy living in the household.

However by March 1901 her circumstances had worsened and I found her living in the Somerset and Bath Asylum where she was recorded as ‘lunatic’.  I can’t help thinking of the difference in the various perceptions of her condition over the years: while some of her more protective family census entries didn’t mention that or her deafness at all, but when she was perhaps more unsettled, for example in the Asylum, she was thought of as a lunatic.  I could not find Sarah in the 1911 census.

In 1881 John and Eliza were living in Gullet Hill, Wiveliscombe, with John working as a general labourer. John’s daughter Matilda was still living at home, working as a general servant, and Eliza’s scholar daughter Mary Ellen Weech was living there also. John and Eliza’s two-year-old Frank completed the household.  Frank’s younger sister Ada was born c 1882.

In April 1891 Frank and Ada were still living with their parents, now in Church Street in Wiveliscombe, and Matilda, now married was back living with them with her two-year-old son George.

Matilda had married c 1888. Her husband was called George John Miller, the oldest son my distant cousin Catharine Rowe whom I mentioned at the beginning of this post and Catharine’s husband, a Cornish carpenter also called George John Miller.

John and Eliza had had almost 20 years together by the time John died c early 1895. After his death Eliza went to live with her daughter Mary from her first marriage (1901). Mary had married a domestic coachman called Frederick Bartlett from Chelsea, London, and were living locally with four children: Amy, Frederick and twin boys Henry and Edward.   Mary and Frederick went on to have four more by 1911 – William, Leonard, Ada and Violet, although oldest son Frederick died before the 1911 census.  Eliza died in spring 1904, still within the same registration district [Wellington] in Somerset.

I don’t know where Matilda and George would have met or where they married, but his parents had been working in Glamorgan, South Wales. They were living in the Cardiff area in April 1891 but by November 1891 had moved to Newport, Monmouthshire; they were both still living in Newport in 1939.

Together Matilda and George had 13 children, grimly by 1911 they had lost six of those 13.  The seven I have found were George (1889), Agnes (1891), Alice/May (1896), Catharine (1898), Albert Henry (1902), Hilda Elizabeth (1904) and Frank (1906).

Matilda died in early 1945 at the grand old age of 79, good I think for a woman of such an impoverished upbringing.  George died ten years later in 1955, aged 88.

​Text © Lynne Black, February 2016
First published: https://starryblackness.wordpress.com/2016/02/07/matilda-stoaling/
Sources: Ancestry, FindMyPast; Genuki; Huish Champflower on Genuki, Vision of Britain and Wikipedia; Wiveliscombe on Genuki, Vision of Britain, Ancestral Histories and Wikipedia.  All accessed 6 February 2016.

Following my latest blog at Borders Ancestry, I was contacted by Valerie Glass who is a regular follower and contributor of #AncestryHour.  You will probably know her as @NthHist or @BDHHM (Belford and District Hidden History Museum). Valerie wondered if this fabulous tale from a bygone era would be of interest to our followers.  Personally I think it is little gem, and just the sort of detail that adds colour and personality to our research.  The article first appeared in The Friends of Berwick and District Museum and Archives Newsletter, September Issue 2009.

As a child growing up in the 1950’s I heard from my grandfather the story of his uncle, John Redpath, who ran off to America in 1867 and who, in doing so, “broke his mother’s heart”. The adventurer returned to Northumberland, over 50 years later, having survived various vicissitudes of fortune during the intervening years, eventually making his fortune as owner of an iron foundry in McAlester, Oklahoma, USA. We had a few mementoes of him at home, photographs of him with his son, both in Free Mason’s dress, a photograph of him with his younger sister, Eliza (only 8 years old when he left Northumberland) on his return in 1922 and a magnificent pipe sent as a present to my grandfather. Sadly by the time I heard the story all contact with our American cousins had been lost. 

But what fascinated me most about the story was the fact that John had not told his parents about his intended departure and made his getaway on the train south from Berwick. As it passed through Beal Station he had thrown a note onto the platform bidding farewell to his parents and siblings. That was the first they knew of his plans. This is where the story becomes confused. The note was wrapped around a stone or was it a potato……? A stone seemed more practical but I was sure my grandfather had mentioned a potato! Years later when browsing through a magazine I read that cutting a slice into a potato and wedging a note inside it was a common method of sending a message from a train in the early days of rail travel. It seems remarkable today that a young man setting off on such an adventure should rely on what seems such a dubious way of communicating. His parents at that time lived at Fenwick Granary a few miles away. However, the note must have reached them for the story had come down to me 100 years later. In the meantime the vision of young 22 John Redpath setting out for America and casting the note onto the railway platform at Beal Station remained vivid in my mind. 

Some years later, when I had embarked on researching my family history in earnest, the mystery of how the note reached John’s parents was solved. I discovered through the census returns that his maternal grandparents, John and Mary Suthern, were living at Beal Station at the time of his departure. The note must have been passed to them and then on to their daughter (John’s mother) at Fenwick Granary, a few miles down the road.

What is more, I also discovered from my American cousins whom I managed to contact through an advert in an Oklahoman newspaper, that John had been employed as a railway guard before his departure. So he could have a good knowledge of the speed of trains passing through Beal and how to take aim with his stone/potato! So far none of the American side seems to have heard the story of the railway platform. I suppose it made a much greater impression upon the relatives he left behind in Northumberland whereas John himself would quickly forget the incident in the excitement of the adventures which lay ahead of him; he survived a 6 week voyage across the Atlantic to disembark in Philadelphia and went on to work for the Union Pacific railway, being present at the Golden Spike ceremony when the railway tracks from the East and west Coasts were joined together. I have seen a photograph of this with numerous railway workers included but it is not clear enough to attempt identification. He married a young woman of Durham-born immigrants shortly after his arrival in America and produced a family of 11. Amazingly it was from my American relatives that I learnt where John’s parents (my great greatgrandparents) are buried! I am sure there is more to find out about my illustrious railway ancestor!

​Valerie Glass

You can follow Valerie and find out all that is happening with the North Northumberland Family History Society @NthHist with more information at:
http://www.ndfhs.org.uk/branches/north-northumberland/

Belford Hidden History Museum can be found @BDHHM on Twitter and on their website
http://www.belfordhiddenhistory.co.uk/