Particular names featured prominently
in our family. On my mother’s side it
was definitely Margaret at least as far as the first-born girls were
concerned. Slightly adapted as Mag,
Maggie, Meg, Mig and sometimes even Daisy or Peggy, which I found inexplicable,
the Margarets pushed their way into each generation. This trend only ceased in 1962 when Aunt
Mag’s daughter, Margaret Rose firmly gave her own daughter the name Jayne. Both her mother and Old Nan felt she had let
them down and lost no time in telling her so.
But that really is beside the point because it is my father’s family I now
want to focus upon and they unquestionably favoured Constance and by the second
half of the twentieth century that name was firmly established and appeared
wherever in the world little pockets of the family had assembled. All the little Constances rapidly became
Connies as they took their first steps away from babyhood and remained so until
reaching grandmotherly maturity when each one became Con. This custom at least helped somewhat to
differentiate which of the Constances you might be referring to when you needed
to.
Aunt Connie was my father’s older
sister and I was fearful of the very idea of her probably because all I knew
about her for sure was that she was a powerful woman and not afraid of defying
convention. At any mention of her my
mother was inclined to purse her lips, fold her arms across her chest and
mutter mysteriously about things that would never have been allowed within her
own family and that there were some who by rights should be ashamed of
themselves. What she was somewhat
obliquely referring to was the abandoning of my father to the Workhouse at the
age of three and her profound shock that it should have happened when by rights
siblings should be stuck together like glue.
Decades later my
brother and I were to discover that along with three-year-old Bernard Joseph,
an infant sister, Mary Elizabeth whose very existence was a surprise to us, was
also cast aside. And despite our mother’s
years of condemnation, we eventually learned that the reason for the extended
family failing to care for these two youngest children was in fact quite normal
for the time and to be expected. The
births of neither child had been formally registered and it was to emerge that
this was most probably because their father was not in fact Mr Charles Hendy at
all but a shadowy stranger, one Mr Gam.
We were to learn little about him except that we assumed because of the
fashion for naming boys after their fathers, that he may have been Mr Bernard
Gam. My mother was certainly unaware
of these most salient facts during those years when she was to liberally
castigate the teenage Aunt Connie for not ensuring that her little brother was
embraced into the arms of the family rather than shunted from workhouse to
boys’ home.
A century later
the main concern of Connie Hendy’s nephew and niece sitting in the Aga warmed
comfort of the Tysdale Manor kitchen and a million miles away from the misery
and poverty that governed the lives of those born before them, was that they
had been abruptly made aware that they were not bona fide members of The Hendy
Family. As Bernard admitted, it was a
rather odd feeling and he wondered if such a thought had ever crossed our
father’s mind.
As a child I
fully accepted my mother’s unquestionably harsh summation where the conduct of
Aunt Connie was concerned which over time resembled more and more the kind of
behaviour more becoming to the devil incarnate than a teenage girl whose family
had been torn apart. And as the years
passed and more was uncovered with regard to the drunkenness and aggression of
Kate, her mother and the total disregard she appeared to hold for the general
welfare of any of her offspring, it was her oldest daughter Connie who
continued to hold place as the firm villain in the saga at least as far as my
mother was concerned.
Sadly Kate Hendy
was renowned in Chatham for neglecting her children and was said not to care
tuppence about them. The Stipendiary
Magistrate, Mr Alick Tassell summed her up in precisely this way in November
1913 when sentencing her to prison with hard labour for a period of three
months. He also noted that her lack of
concern appeared to come about because of her addiction to alcohol. At the time only three of her eight children
were in her care, Walter aged 13, Bernard aged 3 and Mary Elizabeth aged 6
months. She was charged with neglecting
them in such a manner as to cause them unnecessary suffering.
One Mr L.A.
Goldie prosecuted on behalf of the National Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children and he said the case was an extremely alarming one,
entirely due to the woman’s intemperate habits.
He further announced that her husband, a pensioner from the Royal
Marines, was a man of most excellent character who had lost both his home and
his job on account of her aggression and drinking habits. He now felt compelled to live apart from
her.
Annie Burton, a
neighbour attested that Kate was seen drunk most days, left the youngest
children alone for hours and when she did take them out with her, was
frequently seen stumbling drunkenly in the street with the baby in her
arms. When given notice to quit her
room her habit was to both ignore the demand and threaten the messenger. She seemed to fear no-one, Police
included. Inspector Collard, NSPCC,
said when he made a visit on a Saturday morning he found the baby lying in an
old tin bath upon a dirty pillow and the youngest boy sleeping on bare
boards. They were both filthy and
verminous and their mother was nowhere to be found. That evening a further visit was made by
two inspectors and Kate was arrested in consequence of her extremely abusive
behaviour towards them. The children
were removed to The Workhouse the same night.
When she appeared
in Court my grandmother denied neglecting her children and told the Magistrate
that she had always done her best for them.
She further added that she would never do anything to harm them and woe
betide anyone who did! She admitted
that her husband declined to live with her because the two youngest were not
his but that his absence had nothing whatsoever to do with her drinking. It was at this point that the Magistrate
pointed out that there was overwhelming evidence to show that the children had
been seriously neglected and that the prisoner clearly did not care tuppence
about them – and sentenced her to prison.
Easily shocked,
especially where the lapses of others were concerned my mother was fortunately
totally ignorant of these rather distasteful details of the family story. She had Right on her side to some extent for
although her own parents had frequently fallen down significantly in their
overall nurturing ability, neither of them as far as we knew had featured in NSPCC
newspaper reports or been sent to prison for their failures. It was perhaps this ignorance of all the
facts that served to keep the much maligned Aunt Connie in her place as the
rather baffling harbinger of my father’s early misfortunes.
Growing up I gave
my father’s side of the family scant attention and had no curiosity about them
whatsoever. For a number of years we
visited the family of his oldest brother, Walter but I did not give much
thought as to where he and his ten children fitted on the branches of the
family tree. Uncle Walter ruled with a never wavering rod of iron which
triggered not only his wife and children to treat him with a great deal of
respect but also my brother and myself.
His eight sons and two daughters were somewhat surprisingly each
possessed of rather more intellect than would be expected at first glance
considering the lowly circumstances under which they lived. Despite the fact that they were given little
attention from either parent, and learned to demand nothing from them, and that
they neither individually nor as a group owned books or toys, somehow or other
this innate ability struggled through for each of them. This ensured that when the time came they one
after another passed the dreaded eleven plus examination with ease. Being allowed to take advantage of this
opportunity was a separate hurdle and a lot of discussion was ploughed through
before Uncle Walter could be persuaded to capitulate. This mostly had to do
with the cost of the many uniform items involved in attending the local grammar
school. Furthermore, like The Taliban,
Walter was particularly against girls gaining too much education and his
youngest, again a Connie said that she, in particular, only escaped the
clutches of the Secondary Modern school via Wombwell Hall when she was
thirteen. Even then her father insisted
on choosing her subjects and she was registered into the domestic course
against her will.
Conversely my own
father placed a great deal of emphasis on education for all and the need to
grasp every chance that might come your way.
At the time I was of course ignorant of the fact that being raised
within the confines of the Medway Cottage Homes was not as bad a fate as might
be imagined. Quite apart from what the
future had in store for each of the children born to Kate Hendy, it now seems
clear that perhaps surprisingly, the oddly placed thread of intelligence and
application ran through the entire family.
Even those spawned at a time when their mother consumed alcohol on a
daily basis seemed to escape the worst possible outcomes of this activity.
Aunt Connie
herself was forgotten for decades until, I met up with her quite unexpectedly
in the nineteen seventies in New Zealand by which time she had become Con. Then in her seventies she had embarked on a
two-year working holiday during which time she organised several family
weddings and took a job as housekeeper to the then Chairman of the Auckland Hospital
Board, Sir Frank Rutter. Con had
definitely not morphed into a Little Old Lady, this was still clearly a woman
of independence and determination. I was
keen to meet her but at the same time cautious.
Aware of the past
vitriol and bitterness that had invariably accompanied any gossip that
surrounded her I was uncertain and wondered what her view of me might be. Reassuringly she was both charismatic and
friendly, a larger than life character with the kind of personality that it was
impossible not to be drawn to. We met
regularly over a year or so at the homes of several first and second cousins
who were still Connies. We spoke a great
deal about the past, though she displayed some reluctance when speaking of the
worst excesses of her mother and was not nearly as condemning of her as might
be expected. There was not a vestige of the victim about Aunt Con.
Admittedly of her
many stories I only half believed her when she told me of her exploits during
The First World War and that she had been the first female crane driver at
Chatham Dockyard. I decided that she was
doing what I might once have done myself and simply elaborated upon the facts
to ensure that the story appealed to the listener. Those were the days, she said, pouring
herself another cup of tea and settling back in her chair with a faraway look
in her eye - and what days they had been!
And then when the time came for her to return to England, once more she
was forgotten as day-to-day life took over, eclipsing such episodes of memory
whether they were true or false or exaggerated.
It was therefore with some surprise recently
that I learned from Linda, a third cousin that this redoubtable Aunt, was never
completely suppressed and had surfaced once again and now featured in an
exhibition at her greatly loved the world-famous Dockyard. And those tales of hers of a hundred years
ago were completely accurate! Clearly Constance Huggett (nee Hendy) was,
despite the difficult circumstances of her early life, always destined to find
a place in that very special breed of twentieth century women - the group
ordained to lead the charge in the emancipation of their sex. These were the women who combined strength
with stamina and resilience and achieved things that would never fail to
surprise the generations that followed them.
As long ago as 1917 the redoubtable Aunt Con was exactly what she said
she was - a Slinger!
