#15170, Edith Gertrude POPE

Edith was the second daughter in a family of six children. They lived in Gloucester where her father William Edgar Pope worked as a ship’s broker. The whole family including Edgar’s mother, born Mary Ann May, were present at their home one lunchtime in September 1879 when, after the meal when the family had all gone upstairs, he took a gun and shot himself in the head. He had been depressed with severe headaches and his business was going badly. Edith was ten at the time. The impact of his death on the family must have been immense yet no mention was made of it in any of the family correspondence they left. Edgar’s wife, Eliza, rallied round and, with the help of a local draper, moved the family to Northgate Street in Gloucester where she worked as his assistant. The older girls, May, Edith, Lillie and Elsie, later moved to London to find work. Edith became a barmaid at the Criterion in Piccadilly where she met William Ernest Gray an electrical engineer, who used to entertain his business clients there. Edith and William married in December 1895 and moved to live in Tours, France, where they stayed for the next three years. It was there that their daughter Edith Mary Gray was born.

On their return to London Edith enjoyed the rise in her circumstances both socially and financially. She was able to afford finer clothes and to mix with a ‘better off’ social group. She was a gifted needlewoman and enjoyed stitching tapestries or crocheting table runners and blankets throughout her life. During WW1 she helped with the mending, darning and sewing at the Herbert Brook Hospital. She also joined her sisters-in-law, Sophie and Bessie Gray, in playing golf.

Her granddaughter made the following observations: at table she used to sit with her hands held up so they remained pale and not those of a working woman. She held in low esteem those ‘in trade’ and dismissed her great grand children as of little account because they were part Dutch. She used to enjoy being driven in her Rolls Royce to visit her relations, lauding over them her elevated position in society.

She was widowed at 61 and continued to live on in Blackheath for the next twenty six years with her few servants and her chauffeur to hand until her death at 87 years old. Her three grandchildren visited but she restricted Josephine, a bookworm, to reading a single chapter a day. After having done so she sought refuge in the kitchen where she enjoyed helping the cook.

Perhaps if Edith had discussed more of her early experiences and her consequent ambitions in life more openly in the family she might have found a level of sympathy that she seemed to lack. However she was born in Victorian times and lived through two world wars, during which time her social front was seemingly what mattered.

Nicky Hibbin