Edwin Stentiford was an illegitimate child. He was born in the Spring
of 1899 and even then, parish priests were still marking their birth registers
to differentiate between the children of married couples and the
children of single women as though the child itself exhibited some
difference.
Could we step back in time to the very beginning of the 20th century,
we would soon discover that the majority of ordinary people held the
view that there was a difference - there was a stigma attached to the
birth of such a child that would never go away. It reflected on the
mother and it reflected on the child who would have great difficulty
in rising above such a
life start. Of the father, nothing much was said especially if he
acknowledged the child and gave the mother a few shillings a week to
support it, thus saving the parish funds.
Edwin's mother Beatrice, was the second daughter of Charles
Stentiford and Caroline Pound who we wrote briefly about in Issue 10 and
she was the second daughter to have an illegitimate child - her sister
Annie having had a little girl, Kathleen, who died a year after her
birth in 1890. Beatrice was 31 when he was born and had worked as a
domestic servant since leaving school - a job she had to return to in
order to support Edwin - who seems not to have been declared in the 1901
census.
In 1903, Beatrice married Arthur Richard Hannaford, a farm labourer
who came from Dartington near Totnes. We shall have to wait for the 1911
census to discover if Edwin ever went to live with them. What we do know
is that at some point in his childhood, Edwin was sent away to live in
what, today, we should call an institution. Edwin's address on joining
the army is given as Chelsea and although we haven't yet traced a
publicly-run industrial school in that place, there were, at that time in
this Borough,
similar privately-run charity schools where children could be placed. As to his joining the Army, it is quite clear from reading
papers relating to other industrial schools, that the decision would
have been made for him by the head of the institution acting as his
legal guardian.
We've been able to add some more information to the family table we
first published in 2002:
