The Mystery of Uncle David

I think the lock-down has anaesthetised my inspiration module, or simply stopped up my ability to think.  The obvious topic for this week's post has not revealed itself to me.  I did think of writing about the way that a blank diary page at the beginning of the month now looks as if a spider has crawled over it via the inkpot, but that would take only a couple of sentences.  I could boast of winning last week's quiz, but I actually came bottom ... and I'm not feeling exactly buoyant about the one I'm taking part in tonight.

So, in extremis, I return to the ever-giving realm of my family history, and I'll regale my readers with the story of uncle David - well, he was actually great-great-uncle David, being the brother of my grandfather's father.  David was born ten days before Christmas 1868, the fifth of eight children, in the Suffolk village of Stanton.  His father died when he was only 10 and in 1881 the census showed that the three eldest children had already left home and the four youngest were at school.  David's elder brother William's tiny wage as a farm labourer was the only income keeping their widowed mother and five children from the poor house.

The next few years could only have been a struggle.  David left school and probably joined his brother in the fields; the younger children, two girls and a boy, as they grew up, would have become more and more involved in running the home and perhaps their mother would have taken in washing or sewing - the usual occupations for single mothers in those days.  In May 1887, she married a widower in the neighbouring village, which would have involved considerable change for them all.  Maybe relieved that the family's circumstances were somewhat eased, in the spring of the next year, David made his way to Liverpool and sailed for Canada.

He arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in April aboard SS Polynesian.  For a 19-year-old, it must have been quite daunting, but also a great challenge, to start out on a new life thousands of miles from everything he'd known up to then, in a country that was, in effect, doing the very same thing: Canada itself was barely 20 years old.  The next twelve years were spent travelling bit by bit across the continent, gradually gaining confidence, experience, possessions and sufficient savings to provide security.  The next record I have of him is on 18th April 1901, when he was listed as a miner at the settlement of Rossland Riding in the British Columbia census.

This is where the mystery begins.  In the next twelve years, David re-entered Canada twice more and, in the meantime, left definite traces of his life in England.  The only evidence - if it exists at all - of his return journeys to England lies apparently in un-indexed passenger lists accessible only at the Public Record Office.  All searchable attention, it seems, has been given to emigration and none to returns to these islands, however temporary.

The first trace of David's return is at Langham, Essex, where he married Annie Flatman on 1st October 1906.  Both of Annie's parents had died during the previous year and this might have been one reason for David's return to England, although we don't know when that was.  Nor do we know why, when the families of both of them lived in north Suffolk, they married in a village just outside Colchester.  The timing of their wedding was critical for, only four days later, they left Liverpool on RMS Empress of Britain, bound for Quebec.  On their arrival on 12th October, they were marked as 'Returning Canadians', bound for New Westminster, BC, and it was there the following year that their daughter Ivy Annie Sturgeon was born.

 

The next 'missing' record is the return of the trio, David, Annie and Ivy, to Suffolk some time before August 1908, for it was on 20th August that their next child, Nevelin David, was born in Redgrave, possibly at the home of Annie's brother and his family.  Either that Michaelmas or the next would probably have been the timing of their move to Hinderclay, to Mudds Farm, where their third child, Clifford George, was born on 5th March 1910.  Their stay at Mudds Farm was long enough to get settled and complete such formalities as the 1911 census, and electoral registration;  David first appears on the electoral roll of 1913.

However, another precipitant departure prevented David from exercising his franchise.  His eldest nephew was married on 12th October 1912 and on the 18th they sailed once more from Liverpool, this time on RMS Empress of Ireland, and this time for good.  When they stepped ashore in Quebec a week later as 'Returning Canadians', their destination was shown as Prince Rupert, BC, via the Canadian Pacific Railroad.  How different from David's first arrival 24 years earlier!  

As a matter of interest, RMS Empress of Ireland had just left Quebec for Liverpool on 28th May 1914 when, early the next morning she was struck by a Norwegian coal carrier in heavy fog and sank.  The death toll in this, the deadliest maritime disaster in Canadian history,  included 840 passengers, more than the Titanic!