Embedded Files
Arthur Mason Roberts was born at Dedham, Essex on 5 November 1855, the sixth and youngest child of my great-great grandparents, James Mackenzie Roberts and Phoebe Simson Maria (née Mason). He was at the family home, Heath Cottage, in 1871 (his age erroneously given as fourteen), with his mother, his brothers Frank (my great grandfather) and George, and sister Phoebe. His sister Mary was not at the famly home when the census was taken and his brother William had already emigrated to Canada.
Upton Villas, Kilburn is not shown on many maps and was probably demolished in the late nineenth centutury, but can be seen marked here in 1868 (top).
Number 1 was detached so could be the house at the apex of the triangle in the lower map, from 1867. Next to it on the map are the greenhouses and sheds of Goubert’s florist and nursery.
Kilburn
Arthur also left Dedham, sometime in the 1870s. When the 1881 census was taken he was in northwest London, at Upton Villas, Edgware Road (now Kilburn High Road).
His occupation in 1881 was medical assistant to Charles John Asbury MRCS (1824–1909). Dr Asbury established his practice in Hertfordshire, on Broxbourne High Road, before relocating with his family – and possibly Arthur – to London in the mid-1870s.
Asbury was initially in west London, where a son was born in August 1876 at Clarendon Road. This was close to the notorious ‘Potteries and Piggeries’ slum area of Notting Hill. Maybe because of this, or perhaps following the death of his infant son a few months later, Asbury soon left Notting Hill, moving his family a few miles north to settle in the burgeoning working-class suburb of Kilburn.
Dr Asbury is first mentioned at Kilburn in January 1880, at Canterbury Road. By 1881 he also had the lease on 1 Upton Villas, a ‘comfortable, well arranged, detached residence’ at a busy junction on the main road. With him were his wife Louisa, eight children, a female servant – and Arthur.
Number 1 Upton Villas, Kilburn, shown on the right (c.1860). The hut in the foreground is presumably a turnpike, as evidenced by the gates to the side of the road.
Arthur could well have secured the position of medical assistant (which required no medical qualification) via his uncle, the physician William Pollard Roberts – ‘Uncle W.P.’ – who in the 1860s and 70s lived in Cheshunt, the neighbouring parish to Broxbourne. Asbury and W.P. must surely have known each other. So it seems plausible that Arthur’s employment with Dr Asbury began at the Broxbourne surgery and that he moved with him to London.
Mary Ann Flack
Another indication that Arthur lived at Broxbourne is that on 25 June 1883 he married a Cheshunt girl, Mary Ann Maria Flack (born 13 July 1852). They married in London, unusually in the groom’s parish, not the bride’s.
Although she was born at Cheshunt, in 1881 Mary Ann was working as a domestic servant and cook at ‘Belmont’, a private house in Greenhill, at the top of Rosslyn Hill, in the parish of St Stephen’s Hampstead. This was a house with an interesting history, according to Caroline White, writing at the turn of the century.
I don’t know Arthur’s precise address when he married – it is just given as St Peter’s Belsize Park on the marriage record – but certainly he was no longer at Upton Villas by 1883 and was no longer a medical assistant: he was now a veterinary surgeon.
When Arthur married Mary Ann in the summer of 1883 he was what would later be termed an ‘existing practitioner’ of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons. Existing practitioners were vets who started working prior to the 1882 Veterinary Sciences Act and did not complete a veterinary exam.
Vets – 250 or so were listed across the city in 1884 – were a small and fragmented group, variously educated, emerging from the shadow of the farrier’s trade.
Through the 1880s and 90s much of the land between Finchley Road and Hampstead would be given over to development (notably by William Willett & Son) and by the mid 1890s the walk to Hampstead village could no longer be done on grassy footpaths.
Belsize Road
After their marriage Arthur and Mary Ann moved into 66 Belsize Road, to the east of Kilburn, between Fairhazel Gardens and the junction with Abbey Road. Arthur set himself up as a veterinary surgeon here and in December 1883 announced his Hospital for Sick Animals in the South Hampstead Advertiser :
Mr A. Roberts, Veterinary Surgeon, can be consulted daily at his residence, 66 Belsize Road (near Swiss Cottage), before 12 a.m. and after 5 p.m. Mr R. also attends daily from 3 to 5 p.m. at Mr Edwards, 7a Elizabeth Terrace, Belsize Park. N.B. Urgent cases attended to at all hours.
Trade directories show ‘Mr Edwards’ to be Henry Edwards, a corn merchant of Elizabeth Terrace, across the Finchley Road in England’s Lane. There were mews and stables here which Arthur may have used for his veterinary consultations. This gave him a presence in the more desirable Belsize Park, the leafy suburb that would be the focus of Arthur’s business.
By 1887 his business had been retitled as The Hampstead Canine Surgery (which Arthur claimed in adverts had been established in 1880) and he billed himself as a specialist in the diseases of dogs and cats. Both animals would have been commonplace of course.
Belsize Road, South Hampstead
Hampstead & Highgate Express advert, 1887
Belsize Road, South Hampstead
The Canine Surgery must have been successful as when the 1895 Post Office Directory was published, Arthur had two additional addresses: on Haverstock Hill and southwards, in Maida Vale, where, according to the electoral register for 1896, Arthur rented a stable at the rear, between numbers 67 and 69.
Back in rural Dedham his brother Frank, my great grandfather, was abandoning work as a farm bailiff in the face of ever deepening economic depression, while Arthur’s London business was expanding. Were the two brothers close? Did Frank visit Arthur in Hampstead? Did Arthur ever make return visits to Essex?
Number 108 Finchley Road is just next to the building with the pyramid turret. This was the terminus for short-haul trams out of London in the 1920s.
Number 66 Belsize Road was sold in 1896 (for £400, according to a notice in the Standard) and by 1898 Arthur had elevated the family from the relatively quiet backwater of Belsize Road onto the busy thoroughfare of Finchley Road, at number 108A. This was a six-room flat above an office, a couple of doors down from a large pub, the North Star (built circa 1850 and still standing).
Arthur also rented Bridge House Farm, Hendon. We know this from newspaper reports: ‘Arthur Roberts, a veterinary surgeon of 108 Finchley Road said he rented Bridge House Farm and sub-let part of the premises to Messrs. Birch and Co., omnibus proprietors’. He kept fowl and ponies here, as well as dogs and probably cats. When in 1907 he was charged with allowing three horses to stray from Bridge House Farm on to the public highway, he showed something of his father’s pedantry, telling the courtroom that it was not three horses, but two ponies and a colt. This prompted a ripple of laughter.
It would seem Arthur had a problem keeping animals from escaping these premises, which in the early part of the twentieth century were still in rural or semirural surroundings. In August 1910, he made the pages of the Daily Mirror, when a quarantined dog called Mick became ‘a national danger’ and the most wanted dog in the country, after it escaped from its ‘legal place of detention at Bridge House Farm, Hendon, the residence of Mr. Roberts, a veterinary surgeon’.
The Mirror reported that Arthur had placed the quarantined dog in ‘a cell whose iron-barred doors rendered escape incredible’. But Mick, with his ‘long, silky hair and coat of orange-red’, ‘gaily climbed out of his cell, burrowed underneath the wire fencing of the run outside and set off on his travels.’ A national (well, London-wide) dog hunt ensued. Everybody was looking for Mick. ‘The veterinary surgeon wants him because he escaped from his premises!’ exclaimed the Daily Mirror, along with a photograph of the ‘canine Houdini’. Ten days later, Arthur received information that Mick had been found, and went down to Fulham, where he identified the dog and brought him back to Hendon. Mick resumed his quarantine for another five weeks, after which Arthur surrendered his tenancy at Bridge House Farm.
Haverstock Hill
By 1911 Arthur no longer had the stables at Maida Vale or the farm at Hendon. Since the mid 1890s though he’d had a branch at 196A Haverstock Hill, a short walk across Belsize Park on the road up to Hampstead. These premises seemed to be stables located, as his newspaper advert tells us, ‘opposite the Vestry Hall’ (later Hampstead Town Hall): the collection of buildings shown on the map below.
Interestingly, ventilation shafts for the Midland Railway tunnel running directly below 196 Haverstock Hill on its way into Euston can be seen marked on the 1895 map. The Underground was also now linking village suburbs like Belsize Park and Hampstead with urban London. According to Hampstead News (10 May 1894), the Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead Railway Company (which would become the Northern Line) intended to build a station ‘opposite the Vestry Hall’, so presumably on the site of Arthur’s veterinary surgery. In the end, perhaps because of the existing subsurface tunnel, an alternative site a hundred yards further south was chosen for the new deep-level Tube station, which opened in 1907 as Belsize Park.
196 Haverstock Hill, 1895
Arthur was still at 196A Haverstock Hill according to the 1910 street directory but this may have been a problematic address as it and the house at number 196 are both listed as unoccupied in the 1911 census and according to the 1914 directory Arthur seems to have moved down the road to number 94 Haverstock Hill. This address was the Load of Hay public house, a once gentrified pub which by the late nineteenth century had ‘degenerated into a mere suburban gin-palace’. Arthur’s premises would have been at the rear of the pub, accessed via a yard to the side of the building (now Hay Mews).
94 Haverstock Hill, 1909, probably just before Arthur moved here. In 1933 Arthur’s premises were described as ‘an old coach-house’, which can be seen behind the pub, marked PH in the centre of the 1895 OS map , surrounded by open land.
He was still at 94 Haverstock Hill twenty years on, as adverts in the Hampstead News for the Hampstead Kennels and Hospital at this address confirm, offering ‘Dogs and Cats Boarded. Stripping, Bathing Etc.’
In 1933 the Marylebone Mercury reported on a case which reveals a darker side to Arthur’s character. A Mrs Kitty Hiam of Leinster Mansions, Finchley Road claimed she sent her cat to him while she went on holiday: ‘It was then perfectly well, but when it was returned it was a very sick cat.’ An RSPCA inspector visited Haverstock Hill to find Arthur had kept not just this cat but several others, and two dogs, caged-up in dark, badly-ventilated and appalling conditions.
Arthur claimed Mrs Hiam’s cat had been brought to him ‘to be destroyed’, but he had been ‘too busy’ to attend to it. He denied allegations of neglect. The case was dismissed, perhaps because of his advanced years (he was seventy-eight). Who knows the truth of the matter, but the details as reported do not reflect well on Arthur as a caring vet.
For Arthur and Mary Ann and their girls, home remained 108A Finchley Road.
By now Arthur was one of just three surviving London vets who had trained prior to the 1882 Act. In fact the newspaper report from 1933 notes he had been a registered vet for fifty-four years.
In 1878, around the time Arthur arrived in this part of London, the author Edward Walford described this stretch of Finchley Road as having ‘pleasant fields and hedgerows on either hand’ and even in 1902 G.E. Mitton commented: ‘Looking up Haverstock Hill from Chalk Farm there is an almost unbroken line of greenery.’ By the 1930s those fields lay under brick and tarmac and the honk of the motor car heralded the arrival of a new urban middle class.
Arthur lived the longest of the Roberts brothers, and died in February 1940, at the age of eighty-five, probably at Finchley Road. He was buried at Hampstead Cemetery on 19 February with his infant daughter Irene. His wife Mary Ann was also buried here in 1943. A photo of the gravestone can be seen here.
Arthur was close to his father’s family, in fact perhaps more so than my great grandfather Frank back in Essex. He was, for example, present when their father, my great-great grandfather, James Mackenzie Roberts died in March 1890, in Southwark. He was also joint executor for Uncle W.P.’s will in 1915.
Arthur and Mary Ann’s three daughters are listed in a 1908 newspaper as guests at the wedding of their father’s cousin Annie Roberts. Here they are given initials which help us to know how they liked to be known: the ‘Misses D., W., and F. Roberts’ (Dorothy, Winifred and Frida).
Dorothy Grace Lovell Roberts
Dorothy Grace Lovell Roberts was born at Hampstead (probably Belsize Road) on 14 March 1884 and so was just five months older than my grandmother (her cousin Alice). She would have spent her childhood years around Finchley Road and College Crescent (see photo above, dated around 1908: these girls however are just a little too young to be Dorothy and her sisters).
According to the Royal Holloway archives, from 1898 to 1902 Dorothy was schooled at a girls’ polytechnic (perhaps the Polytechnic School for Girls in Langham Place: Principal, Miss Petter). She was clearly bright, as she took several Oxford examinations (junior, senior and matriculation) and was eventually admitted to Bedford College, London. She stated on the entry form that she was eighteen-and-a-half years old and her address was 108A Finchley Road. Her father signed as Arthur Mason Roberts, veterinary surgeon, of the same address.
Dorothy was obviously a keen scholar. She took an Intermediate Arts Course in 1902–4 and then a BA in Classics, 1904–7, followed by an MA in Classical Archaeology. The award presentation took place at the Imperial Institute, Kensington. She also gained the Gladstone Memorial Prize (£10 in books) in 1910 for an original essay on Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’, according to Hampstead News (18 May 1911)
It was quite an achievement for the daughter of a vet from rural Essex.
By 1911 Dorothy was many miles from London, boarding with the Reverend Frederick Ware Glyn (1857–1918), the rector of Brancepeth, in County Durham. I assume she was tutor to Glyn’s two youngest daughters, Eleanor (aged fifteen) and Angela (thirteen). I don’t know how long Dorothy was at Brancepeth, but by 1921 she was back at Finchley Road (maybe just for census night) and listed as a teacher at Guildford Grammar School.
In 1925 she was appointed assistant mistress at Bishop Auckland Girls’ County School, back in County Durham, under the head, Alexandra Fisher. She moved to Cockton Hill Road, Bishop Auckland and was still there in 1949, when her sister Winifred died.
Whilst at Bishop Auckland school, Dorothy was listed as a member of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies. She may have taught history, although her entry in the 1939 Register is annotated with ‘School Mistress, Latin Maths’, which seems an unusual combination. There are no known photos of any of Arthur’s daughters so we have no idea of her appearance, but looking back from the twenty-first century, the class of 1944, the year Dorothy probably retired, recalled that students received instruction from ‘mainly spinster teachers ... all in cameo brooches and buns, and it was very strict’.
By the time of her death in 1977, at the grand age of ninety-three, Dorothy had outlived her sisters and all but one of her first cousins on her father’s side (Lizzie). When she died, at Newark, Nottinghamshire (why there?), there was no one in the immediate family left to mark her passing. But she is not forgotten! She left over £8,000 probate, although it is not clear who inherited this.
Muriel Winifred Roberts
Muriel Winifred Roberts, probably known as Winifred or perhaps Winnie, was Arthur’s second daughter, born on the second day of 1887. She does not appear on the 1911 census, when she would have been twenty-four. She may have been abroad. A Miss M.W. Roberts left London on board the Tintagel Castle, on 29 April 1910, bound for Cape Town. Her age is given as simply ‘12 yrs and upward’ (as were all adults on board: Winifred was twenty-three) and her occupation given as ‘domestic’.
Three years later, a Muriel W. Roberts, nurse, aged twenty-seven, is on the passenger list for the steamer the Gloucester Castle which sailed from Cape Town arriving at Southampton on 27 August 1913. This vessel was run by the Union-Carlisle Line and operated a passenger service between England and East and South Africa from 1911 until 1914 (when it was requisitioned as a Hospital Ship). Travelling with Winifred to England that summer, amongst a couple of hundred other third-class passengers, were several other nurses.
There are few questions regarding Winifred. Why had she been in South Africa? Was she one of the 1400 trained nurses deployed there in the early years of the century to tend casualties in the wake of the Boer War (1899–1902)? Winifred’s country of intended future permanent residence is marked as ‘British possessions’: but where? And how did the outbreak of the First World War the following year alter her plans?
According to the passenger lists, during the war, Miss M. Roberts, a twenty-eight-year-old nurse, left London on board the RMS Mongolia (bound for Australia) on 15 May 1915, with a couple dozen or so other nurses all booked to disembark at Port Said, Egypt on the 26th. Was this her? As a hospital centre, Port Said received the wounded and sick from the Dardanelles and Gallipoli campaign in 1915. Later in the war, in its position at the northern end of the Suez Canal, it played a similarly important role in the Egypt and Palestine campaigns.
Winifred survived the war but never married. She returned to London and to Hampstead and retired from nursing before the Second World War. In 1939 she was living round the corner from her father at Greencroft Gardens NW6 and was an LCC (London County Council) inspector of shop accounts: or at least that appears to be her occupation on the National Registration survey of September 1939.
At some point she moved to County Durham, presumably to be with her sister Dorothy, as she died there in 1949, aged sixty-two, her address the same as her sister’s: 76 Cockton Hill Road, Bishop Auckland. Her effects, amounting to a little over £1,000, were left to Dorothy and a line in memory of ‘our dear sister’ was added by Dorothy and Frida to their father’s gravestone in Hampstead Cemetery.
Elfrida Evelyn Roberts
Arthur’s last daughter, Elfrida Evelyn Roberts, probably known as Frida, was born at Hampstead two days after her father’s thirty-eighth birthday, on 7 November 1893. (Another daughter, Irene Constance, died aged four the year Frida was born.)
In 1921 Frida was living in Deal, Kent and working as a school mistress. In 1939 she was a private school teacher living with the Hustwit family in Arthur Terrace, Bishop Auckland, five minutes from her sister Dorothy.
Frida died unmarried at Sidley, Bexhill, Sussex on 20 September 1959, aged sixty-five. She also left her effects (a little under £1,000) to Dorothy.
Although Dorothy, Winifred and Frida were clearly close to each other, they had little or no contact with my great grandfather’s daughters whilst their respective parents were still alive, it would seem. It was an indication that Frank and Arthur themselves were not especially close – this was probably because Frank was eight years older than Arthur and by the time Arthur was an adult Frank was preparing to marry and leave home.
However after Frank died in 1929 and the deaths of Arthur and Mary Ann in the early 1940s, Dorothy and Alice, cousins so close in age, were in touch and must have stayed so, as Dorothy appears in my grandmother’s birthday book (‘Cousin Dorothy Roberts, 14 March’).
Sometime in her retirement Dorothy began to research the family history and wrote a ‘Memo on Capt Roberts’ – brief notes on Lazarus Roberts (her great grandfather) and her father’s ancestry – which found their way to my grandmother and have been very useful in preparing this history of the Roberts family.
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