When I was talking with my husband about who’s story to
tell for this week’s prompt, I said that I had written about seven of the eight
of my great grandparents. It was then that it occurred to me that I was doing a
dis-service to the remaining great grandparent.
Mary Ann Rison, the daughter of Henry Rison and Mary Ann Cook,
was born in Chelmsford, Essex on the December quarter of 1856-7, and baptised
at St Mary The Virgin, Essex, on Saturday January 31 1857.
Below
is a modern day picture of the church from its website
Also born at about the same time was Robert Baden-Powell, founder of
the Scouting movement (died 1941)
Free BDM has a marriage for Henry and Mary Ann Cook in
the march quarter of 1853 which had me looking for births earlier than Mary
Ann’s. Sadly, I believe that Mary Ann was the second child of Henry and Mary
Ann because I have found the baptism of an Alice Alma in 21 March 1855 and then
a death in April 1858 with the correct parents in the right area. Mary Ann had
at least five siblings.
On 24 November 1859 Charles Darwin’s controversial 'On
the Origin of Species' was published
In the years before Mary Ann’s birth Chelmsford had like
many other towns suffered outbreaks of cholera due to unsanitary conditions.
Things began to improve in the 1850s when a network of sewers were dug.
The first address I find for Mary Ann is on the 1861
census at Victoria Road, Chelmsford. She was four years old, giving her a birth
year of c1856-7. Her father’s occupation
was ‘tanner’, her mother’s ‘tanner’s wife’ and Mary Ann’s ‘scholar’. Continued
on the next page of the census are two other children, Eliza E aged 3 and
Minnie aged 5 months. There are also two lodgers.
Also in 1861 the Post Office savings scheme for ordinary
people is launched, and on 14 December of the same year Queen Victoria was
plunged into mourning by the death of her beloved husband , 42 year old Prince
Albert.
Surgery at the time held great risks of death from
infection. In 1867, embracing Louis
Pasteur’s germ theory Joseph Lister reduced patient mortality by more than 50%.
He used carbolic acid as an antiseptic barrier.
Moving forward in time to the 1871 census finds the family
now at 56 Alice Street, Plaistow. Mary Ann’s youngest sibling four-year-old
Eleanor has birthplace of Chelmsford indicating that they had moved to Westham
approximately 1867. Fifteen-year-old Mary Ann is now working as a general
servant.
We can’t know how she met Edward Porter, maybe it was
when she was out with friends, or perhaps she bumped into him while running
messages for the family she worked for. Mary
Ann married him on December 25th 1873 at Holy Trinity Church. A wedding on a
public holiday like Christmas day was a way to avoid having to take time off
from work, thus losing pay.
On the 1881 census at 17 Hemsworth Street were Mary Ann’s
parents Henry and Mary Ann Rison, daughters Eleanor and Eliza and married
daughter Minnie (Kaylor) and her two children Elizabeth and Minnie. It was
common practice for the bride and groom to nominate the same address meaning
that the banns only had to be paid to be read in one parish. I touched on their
lives together in the story I wrote about Edward, called ‘Land’.
Their first child Alice Ann was born on February 6th 1875.
I wondered what it
would have been like for Mary Ann having children at that time. As the oldest
of her siblings Mary Ann would have witnessed her mother’s pregnancies, and possibly
the loss of siblings too. Fear of death would probably not have been too far
from her mind as her pregnancy advanced. She would no doubt have known families
where the mother had died during or just after childbirth leaving a grieving
husband and children. There was no ante-natal care as we know it today, in fact
women like Mary Ann would have worked just as hard as they did before and right
up until their baby was born
Childbirth changed dramatically in the 19th
century with the introduction of anaesthetics. Dentist William Morton developed
the use of ether for surgery in 1846. Obstetrician Sir James Young Simpson introduced
chloroform as an aesthetic in 1847. Queen Victoria used chloroform during her
eighth delivery in 1853. The practice of childbirth anaesthesia spread quickly
afterward, despite protests from the clergy, who claimed that labour pains
are God's will.
I hope she would have had the support of her mother, the
older Mary Ann, to comfort and reassure her at a time when men were not
welcome. I remember the fear when I had my first child,
and the uncertainty about what my body was doing, about the absolute loss of
control over what was happening to me.
The rest of Mary Ann and Edward’s children, eight girls
and one boy, were mostly born at two yearly intervals until the last child in
1898 when Mary Ann was about forty-two years old.
She might have had her babies at the thirteen bed East
End Mothers ‘Home, a ‘lying in hospital ‘where free of charge women usually
stayed for about fourteen days after their delivery. In 1897 the building was
extended increasing the number of beds to eighteen.
The buildings that housed the Lying in Hospital are now
the Steel's Lane Health Centre.
Society in Mary Ann’s time was very much divided by class.
Despite the fact that at the time Britain was one of the world’s richest countries
millions of its people lived in poverty, working long hours for little pay.
Society was also very much male dominated, but suffrage societies were becoming
more widespread. In 1897 seventeen of them combined to form the National Union
of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) which with more than 21,500 members
became the leading suffragist organisation, and I like to think that Mary Ann
might have become a member.
Mary Ann died in the last quarter of 1900 at Romford.
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