I’ve said that Heather knows very little about her mother‘s family, largely because her mother never talked about them. Certainly we know little about Joyce‘s father, James Seymour, but her mother, Rosa Ricketts — Heather’s grandmother — we can identify in the public record, and I think that allows us to paint — or imagine — a picture of Rosa and her family.

Rosa was the youngest of six children born to Thomas Ricketts and Sarah Jane Brinklow. Unlike the anonymous Mr Seymour, once you add the Rickettses and Brinklows into an ancestry.com family tree you’re deluged with “hints”.

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The UK census of 1881 had Thomas Ricketts living at 4 North St, Leighton Buzzard. Thomas was 48, his wife Sarah Jane 38, and they had five children aged between 8 years (Priscilla) and a month old (William). Thomas was a “carman” — equivalent to a modern truck or courier driver, but using a horse-drawn cart or wagon to transport parcels and other goods.

Ten years later the next census had the family still living in Leighton Buzzard, although they’d moved from North to Lake Street. Thomas was now 58, Sarah ten years younger than him. Priscilla, now 18, wasn’t recorded but the rest of the family were still together, and had now been joined by Rosa, who was six. Thomas was a carman still, but working on his own account.

In 1901 the entire family except William, but including Priscilla again, was still living at Lake Street. Rosa was 16. The three girls were described as laundresses. One of the boys was too. It‘s almost illegible, but it looks like Lewis was a coachman. After twenty years in Leighton Buzzard this looks like a stable working class family.

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The next census was 1911, and by then the family had dispersed. This was the year Rosa married James Seymour, 40-odd miles away in the parish of Kensal Green. Sarah, her mother, had died, and Thomas, now a 78 year-old widower, was living with Lewis and his wife Agnes — on a different street but still in Leighton Buzzard. Lewis was a self-employed carman himself now, his father a “late” carman (although he described himself as a market gardener when Rosa married a few months later, with Lewis one of the witnesses).

Maybe they were as miserable as they were hardworking, but why be pessimistic? — that was the way good, self-sufficient families lived in the days before the welfare state. Perhaps that’s why I have this sense of resonance with my own father’s family.

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After James and Rosa married in 1911 the babies began arriving, Joyce in 1913 and Mildred (Bim) a year later. Robert was born in 1917 but died in infancy.

Then their father James died too, although we don’t know exactly when. But he’d been working as a builder, or builder’s foreman, and now his income was gone. I imagine, or try to imagine, Rosa’s plight, left with their two girls, aged maybe four and six.

Well, she married again — an older, lower middle-class gentleman called Joseph Coe. We don’t know exactly when or how they met. The next piece of solid data is the 1921 census, which was conducted on 19 June, after being postponed for two months due to industrial unrest. They were living at 21 Dante Rd in Newington, across London, south of the Thames.

At the time Joseph was 57. Rosa, recorded as his wife, was going on 37. Joyce ( 8yrs 5mths) and Bim (Mildred Joan, 6yrs 7 mths) were listed as his stepdaughters, their father dead.

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Fifteen years later Joseph too died, with the girls in their early twenties and their mother — Rosa Ricketts, then Mrs Seymour, now Mrs Coe — a widow again.

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As I write this, I don’t know what happened next. I hope I can find out more.

I don’t know how Joyce met James Sharpe — Sonny. She spent her life doing office work, and Sonny was a businessman, so maybe that explains it. And the Coes of Dante Street lived only five miles or so from the Sharpes at 54 Chestnut Road in Norwood, so maybe there were plentiful chances for a young man to meet a pretty girl of his age. He was a smoker, and Mrs Coe was running a sweet shop and tobacconist on Blackfriars Road, just around the corner from Dante Street. Angus, who was only about 11 when Sonny and Joyce married, remembered her serving behind the counter.

He wrote:

I used to take their black Labrador dog home on Friday and [roller] skate back to Blackfriars on Saturday, often staying the night, no doubt in the hope of an extensive savouring of the candy, but rarely getting much of those goodies. I don’t think Mrs Coe was used to having a “hungry for candy” child around. Joyce was a delight and immediately became just one of the family. 

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I don’t know much about Bim back then either, but she began as a student nurse at Southlands Hospital, Shoreham-by-Sea in 1937, and qualified as a registered nurse in 1940. She married Walter Wyatt in 1944 and they had two children together. We visited Bim and Wally in 1980, and I remember her just as ebullient as her photos. As a mother Rosa had done well.

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I have three photographs of Rosa. The one at the top of the page is from 1912, just after she married James. The second is with Joseph, presumably just after they were married, so maybe ten years later. The one above is at Joyce and James‘s new house, after they married in 1936, so another 15 years further on.

A while ago I met up with someone whom I haven’t seen for 40 years, and we both said something along the lines of, “You haven’t changed a bit”, but the years show in Rosa’s face and posture, like ours.

What I do know is that Rosa returned to Leighton Buzzard before she died in 1942, age 58, and I want to believe that she returned to a stable sense of place and a nurturing family, because that’s the picture that’s been assembling itself in my head as I research all this. Maybe, maybe not. But life can’t have been easy for a woman twice widowed.