The Dilemma over Children

One of the most talked about side-effects of the Covid pandemic is the effect on, and potential effects of, children.  Notwithstanding the most recent much-belated decision to close all schools (while still requiring them to cater for the children of key workers!), a difficult balance has been hard to achieve over the last ten months.  On one hand is the need for children of all ages to have social as well as academic contact with their peers, and on the other the complex questions of protection.  This has to be taken into account to keep the children safe from each other (albeit perhaps a minimal risk), from the teaching staff, and from passing on infection to teachers or their families.

My attention was drawn recently to the way that, with schools closed, children also impinge on 'normal' adult life.  Of course there is the new challenge of home-schooling.  While some children adapt easily to this, others need almost constant prompting and cajoling to make even the slightest progress.  After all, a day away from school is a great opportunity to do all sorts of other things ... never mind several weeks!  With this unwelcome addition to an existing combination of career, study, and the regular demands of family life and running a home, some young parents are finding it difficult to cope.

Nothing is new in this world, they say.  When I was confronted by similarly conflicting choices in my early adult life, I drifted into, rather than decided on, the simple solution of ignoring children and family and focussed on my career ... a course that had obvious and disastrous consequences and is to be avoided!  Perhaps a closer parallel to today's national situation, with the focus on the children's safety, was the scheme of evacuation that took place in the autumn of 1939.  It had mixed results.  Some children had a miserable time and soon returned to the dangers of home life in a vulnerable city, while others discovered a completely different life that they enjoyed and never looked back.

A few weeks ago, I wrote here about an instance 170 years ago, when a young couple left their daughter Sarah Batley, just over a year old, with her grandparents while they set up home in a new location and, incidentally, welcomed a brother for Sarah.  Soon Sarah returned to her family and all was well.  This week I discovered a parallel situation some fifty years later, where one of Sarah's brothers - named William, after his father - and his wife Jane found themselves in the grandparent role.

William Batley and Jane Elizabeth Canham were married in Norwich in 1878.  In 1881 William was listed as a police officer but, in the ensuing years, perhaps discovered his true vocation for, in 1891, he was working for the Midland & Great Northern Joint Railway as a porter in Melton Constable.  He and Jane had only one child, a daughter Gertrude, who was born shortly after their marriage.

Meanwhile, William Barradell was born in 1867 the son of a shepherd in Throckmorton, Worcestershire.  By the 1891 census he was lodging with his brother in Stourport where both of them were working as 'carmen' ... in other words, the forerunner of today's logistics industry.  His brother was working for a local brewery but William may well have been employed by a railway company.  Somehow his travels took him to Norfolk, where he met and impressed Gertrude, some ten years his junior, whom he married in north Norfolk towards the end of 1898.  By this time, it seems, he had moved to - or at least had probably decided on - a less demanding career with the railway company, for in 1901 he was working as a passenger guard and was in the same role ten years later.

William and Gertrude lived in Mansfield for about ten years.  It was there that their first child, Hilda Mary, was born on 10th October 1899.  It was a busy time for Gertrude.  William was away from home up and down the railway, they were scarcely a year into marriage and she was in a new home and a strange town far from her previous life in rural Norfolk.  Added to that Dorothy, her second child, was born on 26th October 1900.  

Hilda had to go.

By 1901, William and Jane Batley had moved to Cromer.  William had progressed to a foreman porter and their home at no.6, 'M&GN Cottages' had been re-invigorated by the arrival of their granddaughter.  This seemed to work out, for ten years later they were found in Jane's birthplace, Banningham, near Aylsham.  William had forsaken the railway and taken up farming as a new career; he was 53 or 54, and Jane about the same age.  Hilda was still with them, attending school in the village.  She went on to marry William Joseph Timmings in Brentford in 1922.  That was where he had been born and bred, but it was another new life for Hilda.  Like her grandmother, she had just the one child, and the three of them were living in Harrow in 1939.

Gertrude, by contrast, went on to present William with a succession of further children.  After Dorothy, three more arrived while they were living in Mansfield, including a welcome son, named William Edwin after his father and grandfather, and a further four more after they had moved to Nottingham, where the family was recorded in 1911.  William Barradell died in the spring of 1936 and Gertrude's mother Jane early the next year.  Gertrude had moved out of Nottingham to Beeston, and settled in with an unmarried son there.  At the age of 80, William Batley took the great step of moving to be with Gertrude, and it was there that he died almost exactly a year after his wife, early in 1938.