The second youngest son of Lazarus and Mary, Alfred George Roberts, was born at Brightlingsea, Essex in 1841:

All Saints Brightlingsea, born 19 Oct 1841, baptised 30 Nov 1841, Alfred George son of Lazarus and Mary ROBERTS, Brigtlingsea, Lieutenant in the Royal Navy.

Given the seventeen-year age difference it seems perhaps unlikely that he had much contact with his brother, my great-great grandfather, James. When the 1851 census was taken Alfred was living with his father at Great Yarmouth, and was only ten years old, although by this time James had been away from home for almost a decade.

Like his youngest brother Edward, who had joined up in 1858, Alfred entered the Royal Navy, in March 1860, at the age of eighteen – although when the 1861 census was taken, he was back at home with his father, now in Plymouth, his career given as  ‘Clerk in the Royal Navy’.

He joined several ships between 1860 and 1864, serving on the North America and West Indies station in 1861–3, during the American Civil War. He was a clerk in the Mersey (the longest wooden warship built for the Royal Navy and twice the size of the Victory), the screw battleship Nile (flagship) and screw steam corvette Cadmus. All three vessels were part of a squadron harboured at Halifax, Nova Scotia in July 1862, according to various reports in The Times. 

From Halifax, the Cadmus, under Captain J.F. Ross, sailed for Bermuda and on to North America, arriving at Fort Monroe, Virginia, on 26 August. They remained there for a few months, doing not very much, if reports in The Times are any indication, after which they returned to England. Interestingly, the ship was detained at Spithead in April 1863, pending the courts martial of its former captain, Hillyar, and Lieutenant Lillingstone, on charges of cruelty and oppression, again according to reports in The Times. Lillingstone was found guilty of  ‘unofficerlike conduct in ordering punishments to be inflicted upon Robert Baker and other boys of the Cadmus.’ Hillyar was acquitted. Was Alfred a victim of this abuse and oppression? 

By the end of May the Cadmus had been put out of commission and her crew paid off. Alfred joined the Formidable for two months at Sheerness and then, in June 1863, was appointed clerk in the Hibernia. This vessel was based at Malta as a receiving ship – a naval equivalent of military barracks afloat. 

Alfred was then ‘sent home’ after nine months aboard this ship, which he did so on the screw steam storeship Fox, arriving at Spithead on 17 May 1864. ‘The Fox has brought to England ... messrs Roberts and Nicholl, clerks, for disposal, from Hibernia,’ reported The Times (18/5/1864), without commenting further on why they had been returned.

Ten days later, The Times announced that Alfred had been appointed as clerk to the Blenheim, which was  a coastguard hulk moored up at Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire and used for storage and barracks. But it seems he was only there for four months: Alfred’s naval service ends abruptly and on 14 September 1864 The Times announced that an Edward S. Peach had been appointed clerk to the Blenheim. But there is no report of where Alfred went, or why he left. His abbreviated naval record terminates with the comment ‘D[ischarged] Service own reqt 12 Sept 64 to avoid court martial’. But why? What had he done? 

Emily Mary Coxwell Hughes

After 1864 – that fateful year for the Roberts family in which his brother Edward died and his brother Charles went missing – Alfred’s biography becomes rather hazy. 

He wasn’t at home in Plymouth when the 1871 census was taken, and cannot be found elsewhere – was he abroad or at sea somewhere? At the Roberts address in St James’s Place, however, was a visitor to the household that night: thirty-one-year-old Emily Hughes. This was Emily Mary Coxwell Hughes, born at Stoke Damerel in 1836. She was the daughter of the late John Charles Hughes JP (c.1809–66), who when he died in 1866 had family homes at Bath and Morfa Bychan, Cardiganshire, Wales.

Four months after the census was taken, on 28 August 1871, Alfred and Emily married, by licence, at Stoke Damerel parish church. The witnesses were Alfred’s sister Kate Roberts and her fiancé Robert Stephens (themselves soon to be married). An announcement appeared in the Worcestershire Chronicle, noting also that Emily was the niece of Reverend J.G. Rogers, of St George’s Place, Tything (Worcester). Neither Alfred nor Emily had been married before and Alfred is described as a ‘Gentleman’ – an affectation of sorts perhaps, but he was marrying into a respectable and prosperous family.

Over the next decade something went badly wrong with either the marriage or Alfred specifically. 

On census night 1881, an Alfred G. Roberts, aged thirty-nine and born at Brightlingsea, was an inmate of the Tendring Union Workhouse across the country in Essex. He is listed as married and his occupation given as ‘sailor (pauper)’. If this is indeed our Alfred, most likely he was there because a local workhouse board elsewhere in the country had sent him to the parish where he was born: Brightlingsea. (An ancient Act of Parliament made provision for the destitute to be returned to their parish of birth, or to the last parish where they had lived for a year or more, to be cared for there.) 

Emily, however, is not to be found among the 161 inmates of the Tendring Union Workhouse – somewhere she almost certainly never set foot. Instead, she is listed in 1881 about as far west from Tendring as she could get, in a lodging house in Falmouth, Cornwall. She was an annuitant, no doubt living on an inheritance from her late father. Notably though, she is listed under her maiden name of Hughes, although her status is given as married. 

What had led Emily to revert to her maiden name? The obvious answer must be that she and Alfred had separated. The only clue to this I can find though is a newspaper report in the Western Times from eighteen months earlier, in September 1879:  

The Plymouth magistrates on Thursday sent Alfred G. Roberts, late a commissioned officer in the Royal Navy, to prison for a month for breaking into the house of a relative, smashing several panes of glass and damaging the furniture. The defendant said some articles were left there by his wife, but this was denied.

No further details are known, but nine years later, in November 1888, Emily was handling the probate of her recently deceased uncle, Albert Nicholas of Devonport. A notice for Nicholas’s creditors in the London Gazette also refers to an ‘action Hawke against Roberts, 1888, N., 1123’. It is not clear what this action was or if it is related to Alfred’s conviction. Was Hawke the relative whose house he had broken into back in 1879?

In the probate index Emily’s name, crucially, is given as ‘Emily Mary Coxwell Roberts (the wife of Alfred George Roberts)’, meaning they had not divorced. Although her address given – 1 Clifton Street, Plymouth – was in fact the home of a Robert Moule, pawnbroker. 

In the 1891 census, Emily was still down in Falmouth and was still listed as married and going under the name Emily Hughes. It seems she never left Falmouth, where presumbably she could remain Hughes without attracting suspicion. She was alone at 5 Penwerris Terrace, Falmouth in the 1911 and 1921 censuses, still living on private means, as she had been since the 1870s, and still calling herself Hughes. 

Aged seventy-four in 1911, she declared she was married and had been for thirty-eight years (it was actually thirty-nine), but had had no children with her husband. As to the whereabouts of Alfred, nothing is certain, except he was presumably still alive and not with Emily. 

What happened to the marriage and to Alfred? When and why did his problems begin? In 1871 he was the youngest child in a large family of married siblings and the youngest son by some ten years. Perhaps the death of Edward, his brother closest in age, and his mother when he was just fourteen, then his father’s death in 1873, two years into his marriage to Emily, affected him badly?

It is hard to get a picture of his relationship with Emily, or know the background to the newspaper report of 1879. As they had no children though, they could have been estranged since early on in the marriage but had not gone through the public shame of divorce, which would have been a last resort that most couples would have avoided. 

Emily certainly reverted to her maiden name and remained as such until her death, on 29 September 1924, aged ninety. The death record gives her name as Mary E.C. Hughes, but the probate calendar confirms her as Emily Mary Coxwell Hughes, widow. She died at 4 Harbour Terrace, Falmouth, the home of lodging-house keeper Mrs Lilie Goodoff, to whom she left £102.

In 1911 Emily was married but in 1921 she declared herself widowed. So she must have been informed of her husband’s death. But where, how and when exactly did Alfred George Roberts die? It must have been between the censuses of April 1911 and June 1921.