In 1871 Polly’s sister Kate was a costume maker, living at 47 Queen’s Row, Walworth, south London (Surrey, technically, in those days) and it was to this address that Polly also went to live. 

In the 1871 census, she too is listed as a costume maker. In fact, Queen’s Row, full of the usual mix of incomers and locals, was something of a garment district. Their immediate neighbours included clothes manglers, laundresses, tailors and ironers. Also living at number 47 was Reuben Croft, a draper’s carman from Northamptonshire, and his family.

The Underground south of the river was still twenty years away, but in 1871 tracks were laid along Walworth Road for the first horse-drawn trams. Also, the London, Chatham & Dover Railway had opened a station at Walworth Road, on its way over the Thames to Farringdon Street and the City. This would have enabled Polly to easily travel up to her aunt’s in Clerkenwell.

Aunt Emma and her husband Charles Stokes, a baker, lived at number 40 Exmouth Street. Polly’s sister Liz lodged here, no doubt working downstairs in the bakery, and this was where the sisters congregated for Sunday tea. Emma’s letters refer to meeting her sisters at Clerkenwell.

Exmouth Street became the girls’ home from home and the Stokeses probably their guardians in London. Indeed, when Polly married James Francis (Frank) Roberts, at the Clerkenwell parish church of St James, on 26 July 1878, her address was given as Exmouth Street – although number 15, rather than number 40, as the houses in this street had been renumbered in the 1870s (the bakery was in the block between Easton Street and Yardley Street: the original building no longer exists).