A Bermondsey Life …

Elizabeth Regan (about 1859 – 1921)

Elizabeth was the youngest of the nine children I have so far found of Jeremiah Regan and Bridget Monahan who are one set of my maternal 3 x great grandparents. So, Elizabeth Regan was my maternal 3 x great Aunt.

Elizabeth had quite a life; she married three times, was widowed twice, separated from her second husband (it seems) may have left a child in the Workhouse and died in the Workhouse infirmiary.

Elizabeth was born in Bermondsey in about 1859. She lived with her family until she married a John Butler Thomas in St Mary Magdalene Church, Bermondsey in March 1879.

John was 23 and working as a Lighterman on the river Thames. John came from Bermondsey too but in 1871 he had been working as a servant in a house in Bloomsbury, London.

John’s Father was a Lawyer rather than the more usual Labourers and Dock Workers that I’ve found in my research.

In 1870, John’s elder sister, Alice, had married one of Elizabeth Regan’s elder brothers, Timothy. So unusually, two sets of siblings from two separate families had married each other.

Witnesses at the Wedding were Cornelius Regan (another one of Elizabeth’s brothers) and Alice Regan, John’s sister, Alice Butler Thomas, who had married Elizabeth’s brother, Timothy Regan.

Elizabeth may well have met John through her brother’s marriage with John’s sister. Timothy Regan was also a Thames Lighterman and may have recommended John for employment in the Docks which was very much an industry where relatives were often brought in by existing employees to work there.

But tragedy was to strike Elizabeth and John less than a year into their marriage when, on 24th January 1880, on his 24th birthday, John Butler Thomas was killed in an accident while working on the Thames.

The Death Certificate explains that he “Drowned by falling from a barge. Under the water for four hours”. The accident was reported in the Lloyds of London Newspaper the next day, 

The outlined paragraph shown in the newspaper above, says the following,

“LIGHTERMAN DROWNED ON HIS BIRTHDAY.  

A sad birthday fatality was reported to the Southwark Coroner by Mr Mummery, Officer for St Olave’s.  It appears that John Butler Thomas, living at 25 Thomas Street, a Lighterman by trade, was married but a few months since. Yesterday was his 24^th birthday and it was intended to celebrate the event in a suitable manner in the course of the evening. Thomas, however, did not live to see the close of the day.  He left home as usual early in the morning and went to St George’s Terrace where he was to take charge of a barge belonging to Mr Tarnley. In attempting to push the barge from the river side to mid-stream, he slipped and fell into the water.  Efforts were made to rescue him but his body was not recovered for two hours when life was found to be extinct”

It makes me sad to think of this very ordinary family planning to celebrate John’s birthday only for him to die at work. It is particularly poignant since, three months after John died, Elizabeth gave birth to their daughter, Elizabeth, born in May 1880. 

After John’s death and daughter Elizabeth’s birth, Elizabeth Regan’s life seems to take a bit of a complicated turn.

By the time of the 1881 Census, taken on 3 April that year, so less than a year after Elizabeth had given birth to hers and John’s daughter, Elizabeth is living in lodgings and sharing them with two other women.  All three women describe themselves as Charwomen. The others are much older than Elizabeth. Elizabeth is described as the Head and the other two as lodgers. They all say they are Widows. There are, additionally, two other families living at the same address which made a total of thirteen people living in, what I suspect were, very cramped and unsanitary conditions.

I can find no trace of John and Elizabeth’s little daughter on the census for that year but I can find her death in 1887 aged just 7.

Elizabeth Butler Thomas died from Potts Disease which is, apparently, a form of TB that occurs outside the lungs, usually in the vertebrae. TB can affect several tissues outside the lungs including the spine, so this was apparently a kind of tuberculous arthritis of the intervertebral joints. Little Elizabeth died in the St Olave’s Poor Law Union Infirmiary in Bermondsey

The Death Certificate says that the death of Elizabeth Butler Thomas (called Elizabeth Thomas on her death certificate) was registered by her mother who was present when the child died.  

But in the intervening time following Elizabeth Butler Thomas’s birth and death, Elizabeth Regan had in fact remarried and was now Elizabeth Waddington.

In the 19th century, it was very difficult for women to forge a successful single life. If they were widowed, women would be under pressure to remarry to have an income and someone to provide money for them to survive. Likewise, men who were widowed would need to remarry to have someone to look after their children. Although it was also common for widowed men with dependent children to distribute the children amongst relatives who would frequently, take them in.

So, in May 1882, Elizabeth had married a James Waddington, a Widower from Yorkshire, who was a Bricklayer. Their Marriage is in the same church as the one in which Elizabeth had married John Butler Thomas just three years earlier.

Elizabeth and James Waddington went on to have three children together (James’s children from his first marriage were taken in by relatives and never came to live with him and Elizabeth). I have no way of knowing whether Elizabeth and John Butler Thomas’s daughter lived with Elizabeth and her new husband. The fact that little Elizabeth died in the Workhouse infirmiary does not necessarily imply that she was living there, although she may have been. Many poor families used the Workhouse infirmary when they were ill because they could not afford to see a doctor.

In 1891, Elizabeth and James are living as a family with their three children in Bermondsey.

By the time of the 1901 census though, Elizabeth and James are living separately. James has gone back to Yorkhire where he came from originally and their eldest child has gone with him. Elizabeth is living with their two younger daughters and is again working as a Charwoman in Bermondsey.

Elizabeth is using the surname of Morris. This appears to pre-empt her third marriage to a William Morris in 1914 some 13 years later although on the 1911 Census, Elizabeth has reverted to Waddington. On that census, Elizabeth is living alone (both her girls married in 1909 – strangely, to two boys who lived next door to each other) and she is still working as a Charwoman.

Elizabeth married for the third time to William Morris, in October 1914, just a few months after the outbreak of WW1, at the Bermondsey Register Office. Elizabeth was 55. Her third husband was a Dock Worker but at the time of their marriage was serving as a Private in the 9^th Cavalry Reserve Regiment and he was 11 years younger than her.

Elizabeth died in 1921 aged 61 from what appears to have been Acute Renal Failure, again in Bermondsey Workhouse Infirmary as had two of her brothers and her youngest daughter.

Her third husband, William Morris had pre-deceased her but I’m not sure exactly when. A niece of Elizabeth’s registered her death.

What a life Elizabeth had. Twists and turns amongst the poverty of south London. Three husbands, four children, disease, poverty, tragedy and the Workhouse. Tough times.