The Stevensons and the Reynolds - Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Freddie couldn't get himself a permanent job in the Penicuik area so he packed his bags and made for London hoping for better things. Within a year he met and married Ellen Payne, daughter of a brewer's drayman, Erasmus Eli Payne and Elizabeth Clarke. Freddie's jobs in London included hotel porter, garage attendant and London Transport porter; jobs which would not have done his back much good.
His Sundays were taken up with lay preaching at one of the Baptist chapels in the city. Joyce has a memory of coming home after church one Sunday with her father and her sister Jean across Lambeth Bridge. Freddie picked Joyce up and pretended to throw her over the parapet of the bridge. Joyce's memory of this was that it was all one big joke, and she still remembers laughing and giggling as father made to chuck her over. Some fifty-odd years later Joyce was telling her big sister Jean that this was one of her earliest memories. Jean, some two years older and with a better memory of this episode told Joyce that Father was not in a joking mood and was in fact very angry with the pair of them, that Jean had taken Joyce out to the toilet at the back of the church and that in washing their hands they had turned on the water tap too full and had been unable to turn it off again, causing much hilarity between the two of them, which hilarity had been heard throughout the church, thoroughly embarrassing their father, and leaving him in no mood for play. Oh dear, how childhood memories can play tricks!
In the winter of 1935/36 Jean tells us that she was out walking with her father when he slipped on the icy pavement and landed on his back. Freddie found that he couldn't get up and Jean had to run for help. That was the start of Freddie's paralysis because from then on he was bedridden either at home or in hospital.
That was the real start of the family's troubles. There was never much spare cash in the house and "Uncle"(the pawn shop) was always a friend in (dire) need. There was Ellen with a bed-ridden husband and a family of four girls and a boy, the eldest, Janet being just ten years old. Social Security benefits for families such as this were still some time in the future. Ellen tried to keep the family together by doing odd jobs and on at least one occasion managing to buy some sugar and apples and making and selling toffee apples. Things became so tough for Ellen in trying to keep her family together that she even had to pawn her wedding ring.
Eventually it all became too much for her, she was at her wit's end trying to feed and keep her family together and on an occasion when her husband was in St Olave's hospital, Rotherhithe, she gathered up the four girls (little Freddie was at that point also in hospital) and swearing them to secrecy took them to the nearest police station. She told the desk sergeant that she had found the children wandering in Brixton Road and she left them to the tender mercies of the local constabulary. The children were taken into care and were kept warm and fed in Earlsfield House, Wandsworth.
Ellen presumably felt she had done all she could for her little family, she could not obtain the wherewithal herself to keep them in food and clothes and she presumably realised that the parish was duty bound to look after the children if not the mother. But the authorities were very much harsher in those days and felt that she should have done more (What?) to keep her small family together. She was found, by the police, living within half-a-mile of West Square at 15 Merrow Street, Walworth. She was arrested and charged with "neglecting and abandoning her children". (It would appear that the authorities had accepted her story to the desk sergeant that she was a stranger who had found the children crying and abandoned in the street but the name and address of this "stranger had not been recorded.” Possibly she had managed to slip away quietly whilst the police were busy seeing to the children.
The day after her arrest she was brought before the magistrate at Lambeth Police Court. Joyce says she remembers the four girls being brought into the court room, Jean says that on seeing her mother in the dock she screamed for her Mum at which the girls were ushered out of court never to see their Mother again. Ellen was found guilty as charged, not having had the benefit of a defending counsel, and sentenced to four months hard labour. ‘O Tempora, O Mores!’
It was obviously a very summary trial. The Judge either was not informed or chose to ignore that, far from abandoning her children, she had taken them to the police station herself. The police had not realised that the woman who had "found the children wandering in the street" and had taken them to the police was in fact the same woman whom they had in the dock. Surely if the desk sergeant had been sub-poenaed to give evidence he would have been able to say "'Ere, that woman in the dock is the same woman what handed in the children to the station”.
Or would it in fact have made any difference? Was she expected to look after her children herself regardless and was handing them over to the parish almost as much a crime, in the eyes of the law and the moneyed establishment, as abandoning them in the street. One can't but think how differently single mothers are treated in the present day? Rent-free council accommodation, unemployment benefit, family income supplement, child benefit and so on were all many years in the future. Ellen Stevenson felt she couldn't cope and did the only thing she could think of to keep her little family alive, and for that she was put in prison. She never got even the chance to try to look after her children again, and possibly never saw her whole family together again in her lifetime.
From then on the children became the responsibility of the London County Council who it would appear insisted on keeping them within its Jurisdiction and within its geographical responsibility.
The eldest girl, Janet, was taken in by their mother's sister Ethel end her husband William Bullock. Little Freddie spent the whole of the rest of his childhood in an orphanage (Earlsfield House?) where it appears he was reasonably happy, he was only about three years old at the time he was taken in to care so probably soon forgot his own family in the large pseudo-family of the orphanage.
Jean, Joyce and the baby June were fostered out in various homes, initially as a group. Throughout the War the three girls stayed with Mrs Gumm and her family in the village of Scaynes Hill in Sussex, not far from Haywards Heath. Mrs Gumm’s reason for fostering was the money she was paid, and probably the children's ration books. She didn't appear to enjoy having the foster children and in fact treated them as servants in the house rather than as daughters to be cherished. Her own daughters came first and last. The LCC lady came round every now and again but she either shut her eyes to what was going on or had the wool successfully pulled over her eyes by Mrs Gumm.
At one point Jean was taken off by the council lady. Joyce and June thought she had been taken in by their auntie and probably wondered why they hadn't been so lucky In fact it seemed that Jean had been complaining of the abusive treatment of Mrs Gumm. Far from being taken to her Auntie, she was fostered out with another family. In fact that was the start of a series of foster homes which Jean saw between then and her seventeenth birthday when she was reckoned to able to earn her own living and went to live with her Auntie and Uncle Bullock.
Joyce and June stayed in Scaynes Hill for a few years more with Joyce travelling daily to Lewes to the Grammar School there.
In May 1943 Mr and Mrs Gilbert Rodgers of Malmains Way, Beckenham, Kent suffered a severe blow. They learnt that their only son Richard, who was fighting in the Western Desert as a corporal in the Cameron Highlanders preparatory to being commissioned in the infantry, had been killed in action. To alleviate their grief and to make some attempt to fill the great void left in their life they decided to take in a foster child. By this time the authorities were aware that the girls were being physically abused by the Gumms and Joyce and June were introduced to the Rodgers'. We don't know if the Rodgers' knew how the girls were being treated in Scaynes Hill but they immediately accepted the pair of them as their new family into Malmains Way and Joyce was enrolled into Beckenham Grammar School. It would appear that Joyce and June at least of the little Stevenson family were at last being treated as all children have the right to be treated, brought up by loving parents in a loving environment.
