Embedded Files
George Witheat Roberts has proven the most frustratingly elusive of my great grandfather’s siblings to track down.
He was born in the first quarter of 1854, soon after my great-great grandfather James Mackenzie Roberts and family arrived at Heath Cottage, Dedham, Essex. George may have been baptised at Dedham, although I have not found a record. His middle name was after his mother’s maternal family.
The 1881 census, taken on 4 April, shows George still at Heath Cottage, with his sister Maria and a young servant, Phillis E. Cant. George is listed as a farmer, his age incorrectly given as twenty-three. His relationship to the head of the household is ‘son’, although curiously, no head of household is given. His mother, Pheobe, had died the previous year and his father, James, was not at home when the census was taken.
‘Geo W. Roberts’ was apparently alone at Heath Cottage when the 1891 census was taken, although the entry seems to be incomplete (no occupation or place of birth is entered) and the house had been up for auction in August 1890, the year his father died. It is odd he is still listed as living there: I assume the house had not yet been disposed of? He was thirty-seven but his age is incorrectly given as thirty.
If George is on the censuses taken in 1901 and 1911, he is well hidden. He reappears in the records in the third quarter of 1916 when, at the age of sixty-two, he married a younger woman, Mary Margaret Cameron Duncan, at Hendon (probably Golders Green).
Mary Margaret was born at Monymusk, near Aberdeen on 17 August 1871, so she was forty-five when she married George. I don’t know if she was previously married.
Highdene, Kitty Hall and the Timaru Poisonings
George and Mary lived at Highdene, 23 Woodstock Avenue, off Golders Green Road. The household (of three people in 1921) was headed by Kate Emily (Kitty) Hall, an independently wealthy, Antipodean lady who was actually about the same age as George.
Kitty Hall had an interesting background. Some decades earlier, she had been embroiled in a notorious incident in the wealthy settlement of Timaru, New Zealand. Back in 1886, her husband of eighteen months, Tom Hall, was charged with attempting to poison her. Hall, who came from a respectable Timaru family, had plotted to kill her for her inheritance and destroy the evidence in a house fire. It also emerged he was a defrauder and drug addict.
Following further investigation, Hall was also then found guilty of the murder of Kitty’s stepfather and handed a death sentence. This was subsequently overturned on appeal, leaving him with a life sentence for the attempted murder of Kitty. Such high drama shook New Zealand society in the late 1880s and for some weeks it filled the newpapers. It is hard to know if George and Mary, or their neighbours in genteel Golders Green, knew any of this, thirty years on. (The extraordinary story of the Timaru poisonings is told in the Black Sheep podcast, 2017.)
After her husband’s conviction, Kitty emigrated. From the 1890s she had various addresses in Britain, but also travelled to Australia. She was in Malaysia staying with her son in 1914 but must have returned to England and moved to Golders Green following his death in Penang in the February of that year.
George’s apparent absence from the 1901 and 1911 censuses could be accounted for if he was travelling abroad in some capacity with Kitty?
I imagine Mary, if not George too, moved into Highdene in about 1914. In 1939 Mary was described as a ‘sewing maid and companion (retired)’. I assume this was to Kitty Hall, as back in 1901 Kitty had another young ‘companion’, Grace Wakefield, living with her in Kent. Mary was not with her then.
Kitty Hall (1856–1925), George and Mary’s landlady at Highdene
George’s Will
George and Mary’s marriage was to be a short one. Three years after the wedding, on 26 October 1919, George died, possibly at Highdene. He was sixty-five, although the record of his death incorrectly states sixty-nine, which suggests it was registered by somone who did not know him well.
According to his will, his occupation was a ‘veterinary’s assistant’. Perhaps this was to his youngest brother, the veterinary surgeon, Arthur Mason Roberts. Until 1910 Arthur leased Bridge House Farm in Golders Green, where he kept fowl and ponies, so perhaps George worked here, a short walk from Highdene?
George’s will was witnessed by his brother Arthur Roberts and a Henry Mead of Manningtree, Essex. In December 1919 his eldest brother Frank seems to have acquired a small piece of land in Dedham – just over one rood (a quarter of an acre) – from the manors of Overhall and Netherhall. Perhaps this was a parcel land inherited from George?
George left his widow £145 10s 4d. Mary was still a companion to Kitty Hall at Highdene when the census was taken two years later, in June 1921, one of two domestic servants (the other being a man, Choo Jing Seng, whom Kitty may have brought back with her from her stay in Malaysia).
By 1929 Kitty Hall had died and according to the electoral roll, Mary was lodging with a retired couple named Watson, at 34 The Ridgeway, Golders Green (George Wentworth Watson, a noted genealogist, was the compiler of The Complete Peerage).
Mary Margaret Cameron Roberts never remarried and by the start of the Second World War was a sixty-eight-year-old widow, living alone at Lichfield, Staffordshire. She died at Lichfield on 24 November 1941. She left no will, it would seem, as two months after her death a notice appeared in the Birmingham Daily Post:
RE MARY MARGARET ROBERTS Deceased. —Will the RELATIVES of the above named, who resided at 3, MINER'S YARD, LICHFIELD, and died on the 24th November last, PLEASE COMMUNICATE with Messrs. S. W. PAGE. SON & ELIAS, Solicitors, 30, Lichfield Street, Wolverhampton.
Presumably no-one responded, as six months later another announcement appeared in the Lichfield Mercury:
The kin of Mary Margaret Roberts (Widow), late of 2 Miners Yard, Lichfield, Staff ... are requested to apply to the Treasury Solicitor, White Swan Hotel, Stratford-on-Avon. (Estate about £275).
Mary had had no children of her own and by 1942 George’s brothers and sisters and their spouses were all long deceased. Ten of George’s nieces were alive: Frank’s four daughters (my grandmother included), Arthur’s three daughters and three of William’s daughters in Canada. All may have had a claim to a share of her estate (£275). But her marriage to their uncle George had been brief and over twenty years ago and George doesn’t seem to have been close to his brothers, apart from perhaps Arthur. I wonder if any of them would have known of her existence?
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse