Eliza and Her Sisters

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Film: Eliza and her Sisters. Tuesday 1 March 2022 by Bee Lilyjones

Light from the north side windows falls across the church to the south chancel wall. Eliza’s brass plaque catches it. I notice it most when I’m held in the line of people leaving after a funeral. But this afternoon St Mary’s is empty except for me and my husband, Michael.

In Memory of Eliza Beck, who entered into rest 11th January 1886. She was kind and bountiful to the poor and a munificent donor to the cause of God.

“I can’t remember coming across the word munificent before I met Eliza’s plaque,” I say to M, while positioning my camera.

Eliza’s grandparents are buried not twenty paces from where M and I are standing. John Younghusband was born around 1741 and lived for ninety-odd years in Gilcrux. John and his wife Sarah, née Pearson, built their life here in the village through the late-Georgian decades. I think about their days shaped by the rhythms of copyhold land and parish obligation, the long-established ways of a farming community that had occupied this fold of west Cumbria for generations. Their headstone records the deaths of their children. Ann at twenty-five, Sarah at thirty-one, Pearson at sixteen; John junior died unmarried in 1855. The name Pearson, carried forward into the next generation, keeps the maternal line visible. Sarah Pearson had come from somewhere, I long to find out where.

Sarah outlived her husband by a year. John died January 12, 1833. Sarah followed the following. They lived through enclosure and agricultural change, England’s shift from common rights to leases and tithes. Their children grew up within it.

Elizabeth married John Beck, a draper in Carlisle. That move, from a farming village to a merchant city. Carlisle in the early nineteenth century, a border city of commerce, English Street lined with cloth merchants and drapers, bolts of wool and cotton stacked floor to ceiling. John Beck knew the trade. Elizabeth moved from a village of lots of the same surnames into a city where trade shaped daily life. They had five daughters, born between roughly 1816 and 1822: Sarah and Mary Ann, then Eliza, Alice, Charlotte. I think about the long line of Younghusbands in Gilcrux as yeoman, and what these women may have inherited in terms of land. What shape does a life take for a woman of modest means and good family in early Victorian provincial England?

For Sarah, there was no marriage. For Alice, the answer is darker. In 1851 she’s in Carlisle, among her sisters, in a shared household. A woman in her mid-twenties, present and accounted for, her name in the census return. Ten years later the enumerators came again. She wasn’t there. Not in Carlisle or the surviving records anywhere. But by 1865, Alice was at Coton Hill Lunatic Asylum in Stafford, a private institution whose fees required provision by the Beck family, or the sisters between them. Coton Hill wasn’t a pauper ward. A “house of care” in the language of the time. A place where people of a certain standing were made invisible within the bounds of respectability. What brought Alice there, when, by what steps? A decade of her life sits in shadow.

Alice died on 5 July 1865, aged thirty-eight. The cause of death is recorded as exhaustion, consequent on “continued maniacal excitement, one week.” The register compresses whatever had been Alice’s reality into a dozen words of clinical notation. It doesn’t sound like a peaceful death. The person present was E. Allen, a member of staff? Whether Alice was brought back to Cumberland, whether the churchyard at Gilcrux has her, I can’t say for sure. See how this moss and lichen move across the stones? See how the frost splits it, how the ground sinks? Some names can never be found.

Charlotte’s story was the loudest of them. She married against her family’s wishes, in Harrogate in 1850, without the knowledge of her people in Carlisle (though the newspapers carried the announcement). Her man was John Horsfall. Through friends, she secured him a position in a merchant’s office in Liverpool. He lost it through drink. He left her without means a month before she gave birth. She returned to her family’s house in Carlisle while she was “confined” as the Victorian folk put it.

In 1858 John Horsfall came to the house where one of Charlotte’s sisters was sheltering her. He made this sister surrender her jewellery. He took the child, intending to use the boy to extract money from the mother. He had already offered a tradesman in Carlisle twenty pounds to help lure the child away. By then the sister had around £2,500, with an income of £70 to £80 a year. Horsfall wanted what he thought was within reach.

In June 1864 Charlotte stood before Sir J. P. Wilde in the Court of Divorce and gave her account. The suit was undefended and the decree nisi granted with costs. But Charlotte’s son, John Charles Horsfall, didn’t live to see it. He died March 20 1865 in Carlisle, aged twelve. The cause was remittent fever, cerebral effusion and convulsions. The illness ran its course over a fortnight. A doctor attended and certified the death. The father is listed in the register as John Horsfall, “a gentleman.”

Charlotte lived another thirteen years. She settled at Ellen Bank in Arkleby. In October 1878 she died there, aged fifty-three. Cerebral disease, epilepsy and coma. The probate calendar granted administration of her personal estate, under three thousand pounds, to her sister Mary Ann on December 24, 1878.

Mary Ann had married Benjamin Scott, a civil engineer from Belford, Northumberland. They lived at Quay Walls in Berwick-upon-Tweed, where the North Sea light falls on the old town walls and the Tweed runs to the sea. They had two years of marriage before, on June 13, 1853, Benjamin died at their address, aged forty-two. The cause was rheumatism, disease of the heart, and the rupture of a blood vessel. Mary Ann wasn’t present at his death. Widowed in her mid-thirties, Mary Ann didn’t remarry. But she got on with many things. She acquired copyhold land at Low Croft in Gilcrux, admitted on the surrender of Fletcher Barnes in December 1871. She administered Charlotte’s estate in 1878. She composed her own will. When she died in 1882 at 7 Howard Terrace in Carlisle, the Carlisle Journal noted what mattered: legacies to local charities, among them £50 to the Border Counties Home for Incurables. The Home received the money and added it to its building fund. Whether she wrote that bequest with Alice in mind, her sister who had died in a private asylum in Stafford eighteen years earlier, the will doesn’t say.

For twenty-nine years Mary Ann managed alone. She outlived a husband, her parents, two sisters, a nephew. She kept her own counsel and left her affairs in order. The solicitor handling her estate placed the statutory notice in the Carlisle Journal on 10 March 1882. All persons having claims against the estate of Mrs Mary Ann Blow Scott, late of No. 7 Howard Terrace, widow, deceased, were requested to come forward. None, so far as I know, troubled her executor.

Eliza never married. She died at Ellen Bank, Arkleby, the same house where Charlotte had died eight years earlier. The gross value of the estate she left was £9,997 19s 11d. Eliza’s property at Gilcrux was sold at auction in ten lots in July 1886. She owned addresses on English Street in Carlisle, where her father had run his drapery. She left £500 to her servant and groom, John Feenan, and a small legacy to her maid, Mary Johnston. The will is complex, the catalogue notes. Its generosity is clear.

The plaque in St Mary’s calls Eliza a munificent donor to the cause of God. The archives name her a woman of considerable property. The records do not give the texture of her days: Ellen Bank in winter, wicked wind whipping against the sandstone, the taste of sulphur in the mouth from the afternoon fire. The records do not record what it meant to be the last sister, the final survivor of a line that began in a draper’s house on English Street in the early nineteenth century.

Oh but there’s a tantalising detail. Among the names in Eliza’s will is a sister, Beatrice Walker, living in India. The name breaks the pattern: five sisters — Sarah, Alice, Charlotte, Mary Ann, Eliza — and then Beatrice (who went east and married a man named Walker?) Whether Eliza and Beatrice wrote to each other, whether any letters survive, whether Beatrice was a sister or a near relation remains to be established.

A few days after M and I visited St Mary’s, outside in the churchyard the long grass is full of life. Bumbles move between dandelions and clover; a butterfly flits through the air above them. My friend Mark and I have been here some time, crouched over a raised memorial, soft brush in hand. The growth covering the carved letters releases its hold in patches. The stone gives up its text the way archives do.

Here lie the Beck sisters, or at least their memorials, their grandparents John and Sarah Younghusband not far away in another grave where the railings were taken for the war effort. But beside Eliza and her sisters, there’s an impressive obelisk memorial to their Aunt Martha Younghusband, and carved on its south-facing side:

“In Memory of William Younghusband. Who died 27th February 1870. Aged sixty-one years. And interred at South Metropolitan Cemetery, Lower Norwood.”

Over the week that follows I learn more. A memorial in Gilcrux for a man buried in London. A man carrying Eliza’s mother’s name. A man who left Cumberland and died in a south London cemetery. In the county archive there’s a legal declaration made by Mary Ann Beck in July 1871, months after William’s death, setting out her account of the family. The Treasury had taken an interest. William Younghusband had died without a will. His estate was worth more than sixty thousand pounds.

I walk to St Mary’s. I read the inscription again. Who was William Younghusband?

To be continued.