My great grandmother Polly wasn’t the only one of the Simson girls to fall pregnant out of wedlock. She would marry in 1878, a (just) respectable two months before the baby (my great aunt) was born. But seven years earlier, one of her sister’s brought greater scandal to the family in a similar way.

Emma Isabella was born on 18 April 1853 at Ardleigh, Essex. By the 1870s, with the death of her father, she, like three of her sisters, was in London. 

Clerkenwell may have been a working-class enclave, but there were some reasonably well-to-do traders here, too. In the 1861 census, Thomas Scammell, potato dealer, was at number 25 Exmouth Street (now Exmouth Market), directly opposite Emma’s aunt and uncle, Charles and Emma Stokes, who ran a bakery on the north side of the street, at number 40. 

By the 1870s, Thomas had moved from Exmouth Street to take over his brother’s greengrocery further west, at 21 Upper Marylebone Street (now New Cavendish Street), near Portland Place. Presumably through her aunt, Emma found employment and lodgings with the Scammells. She may have started off across the road at Exmouth Street, moving into 21 Upper Marylebone Street in about 1870, where she was when the census was taken the following year, just ten days before her eighteenth birthday, described as a servant and ‘shopwoman’.

The three sisters – Polly, my great grandmother, down in Walworth; Emma, over in Marylebone; and Liz, in Clerkenwell – looked forward to Sundays, when they would meet up at their aunt’s in Exmouth Street. One such visit was made just before Easter 1870. Back in her room at Upper Marylebone Street, Emma wrote home:

... Myself and dear sisters were over at Exmouth Street on Sunday to tea ... I am going over to see dear sisters next Sunday. Dear Polly is going to meet me and I think dear Liz is coming over to tea. I am sure you would be delighted if you only knew how comfortable their rooms were. It is quite a treat to go and see them ...

In another letter, she tells her mother, ‘... John has been staying at Yarmouth [Norfolk] for four days and I think Mr and Mrs Scammell are going for a week.’ Mr and Mrs Scammell must surely be Thomas and his wife Charlotte. But who was John? The Scammells had no son of that name as far as I can see.

By the spring of 1872 Emma was apparently living in Walworth, possibly with her eldest sister Kate. Recent warm summers and autumns had accelerated outbreaks of fever in the capital and poor Emma contracted typhoid, perhaps from contaminated meat, or maybe it was the water supply. Her condition worsened and she died there on 14 May 1872. She was just nineteen. The death certificate notes that she had been confined for ten days at number 19 Queen’s Row, Walworth. This is a few doors up Kate, at number 47 (or was this, in fact, the same house? There was much street renumbering in the 1870s). The informant was a twenty-one-year-old draper’s servant, Sarah Chandler, of nearby 117 Barlow Street. 

Within a couple of days, Emma’s body was returned to Ardleigh for burial. Liz and Kate also returned to Essex around this time. The London years were over. 

      Tom Scammell – A Family Scandal

It is significant that Emma’s letters home were kept by the family. From the 1870s a boy lived with the Simsons at Ardleigh. His name was Thomas Simson Scammell, or just Tom. 

When he arrived at the family home, Tom was taken under the wing of the youngest Simson daughter: seventeen-year-old Maggie, who still lived at Whaley Farm. He would stay with Maggie for the rest of his life, until his death in the 1930s. He could neither read nor write and was physically disabled, but worked for a while as a butcher’s assistant and earned his keep in later life by fetching and carrying for his uncle, Maggie’s brother George, at Denton Villa, Ardleigh. My mother recalled he was a gentle man, able to carry buckets with the handle on the upturned backs of his hands. 

Tom’s date of birth was 4 September, according to my grandmother’s birthday book. I can find no birth or baptism record for him but the census records indicate the year must have been 1871 (although the June 1921 census lists his age as fifty-one, so born September 1869 and his age at death in January 1936 is given as sixty-five, meaning he was born in September 1870: this cannot be correct though). With no birth record it is hard to be absolutely sure.

Assuming his mother was Emma Simson – who by 1870 was living with the Scammells – she would have fallen pregnant around Christmas 1870, when she was seventeen. This means she was four months pregnant when the 1871 census was taken, in April. Tom’s physical disability might have resulted from a failed termination. 

Census returns consistently give New Barnet, Hertfordshire as Tom’s place of birth. Neither the Scammells nor the Simsons had any connection with this north London suburb that I can see. Pregnant women were generally confined during the last trimester, so it seems likely Emma was parcelled off to some kind of midwife or mothers’ home in Barnet to give birth, well out of the local area and probably paid for by the father’s family.

Whether Tom went to Whaley Farm immediately after his birth, or stayed with his mother until her death the following year, is not known. Perhaps the former, given Emma’s young age and situation. 

Emma was certainly unmarried, which makes Tom’s surname puzzling: an illegitimate child would be more likely to take the mother’s surname. That together with his given name would strongly suggest his father was either Emma’s employer, Thomas Scammell senior (1821–1900) or the Scammells’ twenty-two-year-old son, Thomas junior (born 1848), who also lived at Upper Marylebone Street. 

As Tom’s birth was unregistered though, his surname was entirely at the discretion of the family, who may have changed it in an effort to ensure he was not viewed as Maggie’s illigitimate offspring. (Despite this, when growing up, my mother assumed Maggie was his mother.) 

Maggie and Tom were together for the rest of Tom’s life. Maggie never married and following the death of her mother, Sarah, lived with brother, George Simson at Denton Villa. She was sure to keep Tom with her.

After George died in 1934, maybe with nowhere else to go, Tom and Maggie were taken in by my grandparents at Lowestoft, when my mother and aunt were still young girls. By now, Maggie was the only person alive who would have remembered poor Emma Isabella and the family scandal of sixty years earlier. 

If Tom was ever told about his origins, he would not have known what his mother looked like as it is unlikely there were any photographs: certainly none have survived. The only tangible evidence of Emma are the two letters she sent Maggie and her mother back in 1870, which Maggie carefully preserved and may have read to Tom. They must have been left to my grandmother when Maggie died in the 1930s.

Tom left a will dated 25 September 1935, proved 8 February 1936. He was illiterate, so it says ‘X mark & read to him’. He died on 24 January 1936 apparently aged sixty-five (although more likely sixty-four), at Lothingland House, Lowestoft’s former workhouse and later a hospital. 

Here he is with my mother, my aunt and their parents. 

Who was his father?

If Thomas Scammell senior was the father of Emma Simson’s baby, there is certainly no mention of this in any records. When Scammell died in 1900, probate was granted to his widow, his son Thomas junior and James Mash (most likely a nephew close to the family: perhaps even the ‘John’ referred to in Emma’s letters?). 

But if Thomas junior was the father, there are other factors to consider. A few days after Tom was born at New Barnet, well out of the way of the Scammell family, Thomas junior married another Emma – twenty-four-year-old Emma Thompson – at Streatham on 27 September 1871. (It may or may not be relevant that ten years ealier, in 1861, a Sarah Thompson, aged nineteen, was a servant at the Scammell household in Exmouth Street.) If Thomas junior was indeed the father, was Tom conceived whilst Thomas was already engaged to Emma Thompson? 

Thomas junior had one daughter with his wife, also named Emma and born at Upper Marylebone Street in 1873. But the mother died in childbirth or shortly after – a Letter of Administration exists, dated 9 July 1873 naming ‘Emma Scammell, wife of Thomas Scammell the younger, green-grocer of 21 Upper Marylebone Street, Middlesex’. 

Thomas junior remarried in February 1874, to a Mary Ann Mash, the daughter of a Joseph Mash, fruiterer, and probably a relative. By 1911 she had also died and Thomas, now aged sixty-three, was living with his widowed mother in Palmers Green, Middlesex. He declared that he had had only one child (i.e. Emma) and that they were still living. He died at Palmers Green in 1925, aged seventy-six. Probate was granted to his daughter. No mention was made of Tom Scammell.