Laura Septima Arden 1892-1990

I was barely nine years years old when my great-grandmother died, and so sadly I have few clear memories of her.

I recall her house. In my proto-memories it seems old and fusty, protected by high hedges, stuffed with a jumble of antiques, every surface covered in embroidered cloth. Dimly lit rooms, connected by goosebump-raising corridors lined with faded photos of the frowning deceased, every door guarded by a serpentine draft-excluder.

I remember something of her too. A stately silver-haired old lady, sat straight-backed in a chair that looked insufficiently comfortable. Few words, at least expressed to me (she usually mistakenly addressed me as Robert, after a second cousin of mine, but who could blame her for losing track of her growing hoard of grandchildren and great grandchildren). The words I do remember usually orientated around the regularly offered cups of tea, which at the time I only ever drank at her house. She had a faint, kindly, knowing smile held effortlessly on her face at all times. Someone lifted from another era. The last of the Victorians.

I do recall her last birthday, her 98th. Someone purchased her two small ceramic bears, one holding a number nine, the other an eight. My father waggishly suggested that she could always swap the numbers around so as to appear to be merely celebrating her 89^th birthday; I still remember her bemused chuckle. It’s a happy memory, though relatives recall her saying at around this time that she was “ready to go now”. Eight months later she did. It was thirty-six years and four days since her husband had died – after thirty-six years of marriage. A strange coincidence.

Laura on her 98th birthday.

Laura’s father William Richard Arden came from a long line of Cheshire farmers. He was the last in his line to be born and baptised in Cheshire, in 1856; his two younger brothers were both born in Wem, Shropshire after their father moved the family across the County border in the late 1850s to farm in the tiny village of Coton near Wem. It seems that William Richard met his wife-to be, Harriet née Mosedale, in Coton. They married in the beautiful country church of St Mary the Virgin in the nearby village of Edstaston, half-way between Wem and Coton, on the first of February 1882.

Laura Septima Arden was born on 16 February 1892 in the village of West Felton, Shropshire where her father had moved the family five years earlier. Laura was not only the seventh child (hence Septima) born to her parents, but the seventh girl in a row. Eventually the brood would grow to fifteen, of whom only five were boys.

For the first ten years of Laura’s childhood the family remained at West Felton, but thereafter they became somewhat itinerant; every few years they moved to another farm, mainly in Shropshire (Rednal, Oswestry), but, by 1907, even as far as Wootten Hawen in Warwickshire. Their descendants speak of a problem with drink, which may have affected William Richard’s employability. The family are said to have made their own beer, butter, cheese and bread which were sold at local markets.

Sometime between 1907 and 1909 he made the extraordinary decision to move the family to a farm near Onchan, on the Isle of Man. This is an interesting story which I will outline in a subsequent blog post on Laura’s family. It is worth addressing separately, in part because it had lasting consequences for the family. Suffice to say the venture was not a success and, after a spell as a hotel manager in Douglas, by 1911 William Richard was back in England where the census lists him as a ‘Cowman on farm’ in King’s Heath on the outskirts of Birmingham along with his wife and youngest children.

That same year found Laura, aged 19, working as a domestic servant for the Colebatch family at Bank Farm, Little Witley, Worcestershire. She was tasked with the care of two girls and a boy, the latter of whom suffered from a serious disability. She then worked elsewhere as a ‘mother’s help’ for a further four years, the mother in question being Esther Huxley, aunt of her future husband Charles Harold Myring.

Charles was a Birmingham-born adventurer who had spent eight years in Canada before returning to England on the Lusitania (sometime before that ship was sunk in May 1915) to join the war effort. He enlisted on 27 October 1915, serving as a motor driver in the Royal Army Service Corps, and (after a proposal rumoured to be by telegram) they married at a registry office in Erdington in February 1918 whilst he was on leave; he was not transferred to the reserves until 1919. At some point during the conflict Laura worked as a munitions inspector in Tyseley, Birmingham; this was her last period of employment.

Laura & Charles

As attested to by the above photo, perhaps taken at the time of their marriage, Laura was uncommonly beautiful in her youth. Her remarkable dark curls are tied back, yet  allowed to fall loose here and there with studied informality; she looks like a gypsy queen, or an image lifted from a Byzantine mural. It is hard to connect the picture with the old lady that I knew – but wait, there is that faint half-smile I remember, and the kindly, knowing eyes.

Laura (r), Charles Harold (m), Laura’s oldest sister Dora Arden (l)

By 1922 they were living in Longbridge, Birmingham. Three children followed: Mary (known as ‘Olive’) in 1922, Eva in 1927, followed by David, my grandfather, in 1929. Her husband worked at the Austin motor factory until his death in November 1954. Thereafter Laura live alone, in the same house in Longbridge, until her own death in 1990. This Edwardian property had featured a central heating system when first built, but this had been removed by Laura’s husband, perhaps for reasons of thrift (perhaps his time in Canada had also made him impervious to winter conditions). Consequently, the windows of the house had a tendency to freeze on the inside and lead pipes bulged and occasionally burst during a frost.

Laura and Eva

Laura and Eva

Laura, Mary & Eva at Laura's home in Longbridge

Three generations - Harriet Arden née Mosedale, Laura Myring née Arden, Eva Myring c.1940

All who remember Laura speak of her kindness and her non-judgmental and loving nature. She seemed to take everything in her stride despite the world around her changing beyond all recognition. Over the years she continued to visit various of her siblings; the photo below is of her with her brother David (in a suit! on a beach!) and sister Willis Mary: a prize to anyone who can identify the location. She also spent time at her sister Willis Mary’s farm near Arley.

Laura, her sister Willis Mary Levi née Arden and brother David Arden

  

She was neighbourly. Despite being half-hobbled by bunions she would start the day by visiting the homes of other widows to make up their fires; a task at which she must have been adept given her own lack of central heating. My father recalls that in the evenings she would often play host to an especially ‘wizened’ neighbour by the name of Mrs Duggins, who “kept turning up late in the evening presumably for the cups of tea, company and to keep warm until bed time”.

  

Among the possessions that have come down to me are a lock of her hair, a communicants book, and a small trove of notebooks. Discovering the latter was a real boon. They are filled with her jottings; lists of birthdays and addresses, remedies for migraines and shingles, recipes for everything from ‘refreshing drinks’ to homemade polish, and, delightfully, numerous aphorisms that she evidently considered of sufficient merit to commit to paper in her querulous hand (many of these seem to have been sourced from the ‘Friendship Book’ which she acquired every year)

Some of these are quite brisk. “Smile please – we too have problems”. “Sometimes it’s easy to think that we have all the worries and others have none – think again”. Others show a humanist bent to her character: “To live a day at a time, to do what seems right at that particular time, this surely is the way out of confusion and the path to peace”.

There are also lists of her siblings (and the years that they died). On the back of one such page we find the following, a poem by William Clarke entitled ‘After the Funeral’:

Those who made the most fuss

Were, I noticed, in effect,

Those who had least called on us and now repented their neglect.

Under this transcription, clearly added later in a more fragile hand, she wrote “Maisie Died June 1990”. Maisie was the last of the siblings to go, apart from David and herself. Six months later Laura was gone too, and David followed seven months after that. And here I am, writing down their names, their lives, their deaths, in the hope that they would not feel so neglected.

BM December 2017

Laura Myring née Arden

Laura surrounded by family, including her grandson (my father) Peter and my mother Jane (left)

Laura sat next to her daughter Eva and son David, with Mary in the background

Introduction

               

Families, like nations, often develop and pass down myths about their origins that have little to do with historical reality. In my own family, these included the belief that the unusual surname 'Myring' was of Dutch origin and meant 'bog dweller' (happily untrue), and that my mother's ancestors the Pheyseys were descended from Russian aristocrats by the name of Vesey (hogwash). The real answers were just as interesting (if more parochial) than these legends.

There was one other family name that also raised curiosity, that of my great-grandmother Laura Septima Arden (1892-1990). My father sometimes wondered whether there was a connection with the Forest of Arden, an area of northern Warwickshire not so far from our home in North Worcestershire. I was also aware that Shakespeare’s mother was an Arden from Warwickshire. It was my research into this question that led to the most exciting discoveries. 

For the Arden family is one of only three in Britain who can trace their origin back to before the Norman Conquest, and did indeed originate in the Forest of Arden in Warwickshire. But while Laura’s father did briefly farm in Warwickshire, I was to discover that he was born in Cheshire, scion of the Arderne family, an offshoot of the Warwickshire Ardens who were established in Cheshire in the thirteenth century. The Ardernes formed a storied part of the landed gentry of the county for centuries, fought in the Civil War, included famous physicians, priests and dandies, acquired the curious name ‘Pepper Arden’, and were later ennobled as the Barons Alvanley before finally becoming extinct – in the main family line - in the nineteenth century.

But there was a mystery; Laura Arden’s branch of the family descended from a junior line who had been modest farmers for centuries, yet her father was clearly aware of the Pepper Arden connection and named one of his sons ‘John Arthur Pepper’. Was he staking a claim to the Arderne family titles and fortunes?

This blog will address that question, as well as exploring other parts of the history of the Arderne-Ardens, Myrings and other family names that crop up in my tree.

I have dabbled with exploring my family history on-and-off for 25 years. Like many families we were able to create a family tree going back four and sometimes five generations based only on living memory and a few scattered documents. Going back further, though, required the sort of research that frankly seemed like too much effort; namely rooting around in records offices. Though I have a degree in history, and therefore a passable skill in finding and interpreting sources, my admittedly enormous capacity for developing a mono-focused obsession with researching something if I find interesting did not surmount the obstacle presented by the need for hard graft.

However, genealogical research is now much easier due to the proliferation of family history websites such as Ancestry.com. It was via a half-hearted browse of the latter website in 2016 that I discovered that it is now possible to push your family tree back centuries into the past with relatively little effort. 

This is very much a work-in-progress, and I suspect that the concept will evolve over time, but I intend that posts on the blog will fall into three broad categories:

1) Profiles of individual family members

2) Examinations of particular generations of the family, and their historical and social context.

3) Broader articles reviewing branches of the family tree over longer periods of time.

So I’ll be exploring the ‘roots and branches’* of my family, hence the name of this blog. It seems only fitting that I start with that grand old lady, Laura Arden.

Ben Myring

PS: If anyone has any questions or has information to contribute then please do get in touch!

*Roots and Branches is also the name of one of the greatest ever Bob Dylan bootlegs.