The bare bones of the these lives are recorded in official documents, including the odd criminal prosecution. But reading between the lines there is a fascinating family saga of working class families caught up in the huge changes of the Victorian era, for better and for worse.

Charles Blakemore was Florence Marjorie Payne’s Great Grandfather, and his life story would not be out of place in a Victorian melodrama.

He married twice and had nine children, including Marj’s Grandmother, Sarah Elizabeth. Charles recorded police records on both sides of the law and spent three months in gaol for assaulting his second wife.  All three of his sons joined the army as soon as they could, all serving in India. Two of his daughters were taken in to care and sent to Canada by John Middlemore, a Victorian philanthropist, because of their home conditions.  Charles later travelled to Canada to retrieve one of them. Another daughter spent time in both a home for “fallen women” and an asylum.    Sarah Elizabeth married but lived only briefly with her husband; her only child Hannah was fathered by an elusive “Tom Smith” of London.

The Cast:

My hypothetical TV series would start in St Albans with Charles and Hannah growing up in a relatively rural setting, but both working from a very early age in the hat industry. They marry when Charles is 17, a few months before their eldest is born. A few years later they move with their four young children to the great industrial city of Birmingham in search of better opportunities.

Tragedy strikes 18 months later as Hannah dies. Like many a working class widow with young children during this era, Charles remarries with a year, but this marriage to Emily Dawson is not a success. Hannah’s children scatter – John to be a soldier, Emily marries a widower with 7 children, Sarah moves to Blackburn and another compliacted marriage. Amelia becomes what the Victorians labled a “fallen woman” (plot spoiler – she eventually outlives the rest of them in what I really hope was relative comfort and a happy relationship.)

Charles takes to drink and becomes violent both inside and outside the home. One of his assaults on Emily is so severe it makes the newspapers outside Birmingham and results in a 3 month prison sentence. Eventually they separate leaving Emily in a different mess. Like their half-brother before them, Richard and James join the army. Jane marries twice (but assumes her first husband’s mother’s name at one point and may live in army accommodation under false pretences…).

Ann and Amy suffer most from Charles’s violence and then neglect. Emma hands them over to the Middlemore home, which sent hundreds of children to Canada in anticipation of a “better life”. Charles gives up the drink, reforms and also moves to Blackburn (in search of Sarah?), eventually fetching a now pregnant Amy back to the UK. Sadly, neither her story nor Ann’s have a happy ending.

Use the links on this page – or the Blakemore sub-menu – to find out more about these lives.