Dear Mother,

Do forgive me for not having written to you before this but time rolls on so rapidly that I had really forgot what I was to write. I was in hopes by this time dear Mother to have been able to name the week to come and see you all as it is what I have been looking forward to all the summer long but I am afraid by what Mrs. Scammell says I shall not be able to come yet and perhaps not at all but I will write and let you know all particulars before long. Tom has been staying at Yarmouth for a few days and I think that Mr. and Mrs. Scammell are going for a week. Did not see anything of dear sisters yesterday (Sunday) but Aunt and Uncle were at Mr. Mash’s to tea for the first time. Dear Aunt has been out with Uncle for months past. I was very pleased to hear Mrs. Theobald confined and doing so well. I should like to see her. Please give my kind love to her also the old people as I may term them now.

I hope by this time dear brothers and sisters and yourself are well. I often think about you although I do not hear from you. I was very much surprised to hear dear Uncle was living at Holland. But how are they going on down at North Hill? I should like to know as we said so little to Aunt on her return on Sunday evening.

Now dear Mother I must close this dull scrawl as it is just 12 o'clock and I feel sleepy.

With my fondest love to all dear brothers and sisters and not forgetting yourself dear Mother, believe me to remain

Your love affectionate Daughter,

Emma Simson

P.S. Please excuse all errors and write soon. Trusting that dear brothers are busy and also successful in their business. Good bye and God bless you.

      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. 

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 Tom Scammell in the early 1930s, in old age, as a gentle man, apparently able to carry buckets with the handle on the upturned backs of his hands. 

Tom’s birth mother must have been Emma Simson – who by April 1871 was living with the Scammells at Upper Marylebone Street. Emma was certainly unmarried, so Tom was taken in by his grandmother, Sarah Simson, at Whaley Farm. My guess is that he arrived as Thomas Simson; the surname Scammell added by his grandmother. 

As the birth was not registered and there was no baptism record, giving Tom an extra surname would have been easy to do. To anyone curious (and what villager wouldn’t have been?), it implied Emma had married a Scammell before she died and that, yes of course Tom had been born in wedlock. As Emma had died many miles away in London, no one in Ardleigh would be any the wiser. 

The family may have concocted a story that the father had absconded or rejected him after Emma’s death, or even that he had been orphaned, which would have helped explain his adoption by his grandmother. (Despite this, when she was growing up, my mother assumed he was Maggie’s.) 

Emma must have conceived 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 could have resulted from a failed termination around this time.

According to my grandmother’s birthday book, Tom’s date of birth was 4 September. The 1881–1911 censuses indicate the year must have been 1871 (although the June 1921 census lists his age as fifty-one years and nine months, so born September 1869 and his age at death in January 1936 is given as sixty-five, meaning he was born in September 1870: neither of these dates can be correct though, especially given his absence from the April 1871 census). With no birth record though it is hard to be absolutely sure.

Census returns consistently give New Barnet, Hertfordshire as Tom’s place of birth. So it seems likely Emma was sent there to deliver her baby, well out of the local area and probably paid for by the father’s family.

When he arrived at the Simsons in Ardleigh, Tom was taken under the wing of Sarah’s youngest daughter: seventeen-year-old Maggie, who still lived at Whaley Farm. Maggie kept Tom with her for the rest of his life, until his death in the 1930s. She never married and, following the death of her mother, went to live with her brother, George Simson at Denton Villa.

After George died in 1934, maybe with nowhere else to go, Maggie and Tom 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, it is unlikely he would have known what his mother looked like: he was barely nine months old when she died and there may well have been no photographs of her. 

The only surviving tangible evidence of Emma are the two letters she sent Maggie and her mother back in 1870, which Maggie carefully preserved and may even 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. 

Who was Tom’s father?

Tom’s father was surely either Emma’s employer, Thomas (aka Theodore) Scammell (1821–1900), or more likely the Scammells’ twenty-two-year-old son, Thomas the younger (born 1848), who also lived at Upper Marylebone Street. He was significant enough to Emma for her to mention him (as Tom) in her letter to her mother of August 1870, letting Sarah know that he was in Great Yarmouth as she penned her letter.

But if Thomas the younger was the father of Emma’s baby, there are other factors to consider. A year on, and a few days after Emma’s baby was born at New Barnet, Thomas married another Emma – twenty-four-year-old Emma Thompson – at Streatham on 27 September 1871.

There are several questions here: was Tom conceived whilst Thomas the younger was already engaged to Emma Thompson? Or was the relationship with Emma Simson ended and she dismissed from the household after the Scammells learned she was pregnant; and he met his wife later that year?

Or could he have been unaware even that Emma Simson had fallen pregnant? That seems unlikely.

And what became of Thomas Scammell the younger? 

He had one daughter with his wife. The baby was born at Upper Marylebone Street in 1873 and also named Emma. But the mother died in childbirth or shortly after. 

Thomas the younger remarried in February 1874, to a Mary Ann Mash, the daughter of a Joseph Mash, fruiterer, and probably a relative. 

By 1911 his second wife 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. 

Thomas Scammell the younger died at Palmers Green in 1925, aged seventy-six. Probate was granted to his daughter. No mention was made of the son who had been transferred to Essex over fifty years earlier to be taken in by the Simsons (and who was still alive in 1925).