Mary Munro
Mary was 30 years old and pregnant with her fourth child when her husband William Drysdale died in 1892. His death was sudden and tragic. William was a doctor in the town of Garelochhead in Scotland when he administered himself with a dose of poison, mistaking it for medicine. He immediately realised his mistake and called for medical aid. Three other doctors tried to save him, but he died a few hours later. The couple had only recently moved to the area so, not only was Mary left pregnant and with three young children, but she was also isolated from friends and family.
By the 1901 census she was living about 50 miles away with her children and her older sister. They were both living by their own means. With no-one in the family working they must have had family money or been receiving assistance of some kind. Ten years later they had moved to Surrey where they were living in what appears to be a quite respectable area. All of her children appear to be educated and her sons went on to have good jobs, so it seems likely she had some kind of inheritance or family allowance that allowed her to survive and prosper despite the loss of her husband.
Peggy Drysdale
Poor Peggy. She not only had a father who died tragically, but a husband who did as well. Mary's daughter, Peggy was 3 when her father died. As an adult, she married a photographer called Harold Turnbull and moved to Kenya (then British East Africa) where he had been given a job working for a newspaper. Their son, also called Harold, was born in 1917. In 1919, after the end of the First World War, Peggy visited England with her young son. It was a long journey by sea and she planned to stay in England for a few months. Harold remained in Kenya to work at the newspaper. Three months after her arrival in England she received a telegram telling her that her husband was dead. He had been electrocuted by an iron.
The inquiry into his death tells us that Harold had installed some DIY wiring in his office so that his assistant could iron his clothes for him. The wiring wasn't earthed and the voltage was too high so the casing around the wire cracked. When Harold touched the wiring he was unable to let go of the iron. His colleagues came running to help, but to no avail. His hands and the area around his heart were burnt black.
Peggy returned to Africa with her son, but she was not as lucky as her mother. She received no compensation for her husband's death because it was caused by his own error. He should not have been installing his own wiring in the company's building for personal use. With no income and no means of assistance she was forced to place young Harold in an orphanage and go out to work. Perhaps unsurprisingly she married two years later, to a farmer, and was then able to take her son out of the orphanage. Where they were living was very remote though. There were a few villages nearby, but their nearest white neighbours were 100 miles away.
When Harold was seven, Peggy made the decision to send him to England so he could be educated. This must have been so difficult for her after having lost him once already, but she took him to England and left him with his aunt for her to raise him.
The farm failed and she and her husband were left with nothing. They moved to South Africa, where he was from, and he managed to get work on a family member's farm. They had a daughter, Doreen, but she died as a toddler. Peggy was only able to visit Harold in England twice during his childhood and failed to persuade him to come back to Africa when he left school. Then the Second World War broke out and she died of cancer shortly after in 1948, never having had the opportunity to see him again.
Jane Osborne
Peggy's husband, Harold, was also the child of a father who died young. He was the fourth of six children and was 3 years old when his father, Henry Turnbull, died. His mother, Jane Osborne, was left to cope with five young children and a baby. Like Peggy, she married again, but she made a bad choice. John Smith, a school teacher, was an alcoholic and she ended up throwing him out. She took in lodgers to help with the family finances. By the 1911 census she was head of the household, despite still being married, but by this time her children were mostly grown up and working and the pressure to make ends meet would have eased.
Elizabeth Derrick
Elizabeth was 37 and had three young children when her husband, Robert Trivess, committed suicide. He hanged himself in the family home. The newspaper report is only a couple of sentences and doesn't say who found the body. At the time all three of her children were under 10 years old.
Elizabeth worked as a dressmaker and nine years later when the 1861 census was taken she and her 17 year old daughter were both working as dressmakers and her 14 year old son as a tailor's assistant. This is likely to have been low paid work and she would have struggled to support her children before they were old enough to help her.
