Stories about my Mother 16
My grandmother’s childhood is almost a complete mystery to me. I know only the most basic of facts. If I just went by the information that I have been able to find, you’d almost think that she had sprung to life fully formed the day she met my grandfather.
What I do know is that Doris Gwendolyn Violet Burrows was born on the 4th of December in 1907 in Bombay, India. Her father, William Burrows was a Merchant who was stationed there. That didn’t mean he sold things. Merchants were a level of Civil Service bureaucracy within the British Raj.
The first pictures I have of Doris were taken just before she married my grandfather. Their marriage was in 1933 when she was twenty-five. I first met her when I was five years old, and she was sixty. She and my grandfather had divorced while my mother was still young. She went on to marry two more men, both of whom died.
Toward the end of her life, with nowhere else to go, my poor grandfather took her back in. In a letter to my mother he says, “She talks too much but I have learnt not to listen to much of her flow of words. She has made my meals more interesting as she has good ideas about food and cooking, and she has brought her television, so that we can now watch television in the evening. Barbara (my aunt) was quite wrong in describing her as an alcoholic, as in the whole week she has drunk nothing more exciting than orange squash.”
My grandfather then died and, with dementia setting in, Doris moved into a nursing facility. I can only assume that whatever pictures and records she had from those early years, she must have taken with her when she first left my grandfather, and they then got lost in one of those later moves or just thrown away.
So, where to start? My mother remembered that Doris had gone to school somewhere in England. She couldn’t remember the name, but told me if she heard it, she thought she’d be able to remember it. So, I started by looking through the top girls’ schools across the UK.
Cheltenham?
St. Mary’s?
Malvern?
No. There are well over two hundred private girls’ schools in England. I tried listing a few more and then gave up. I think if I had stumbled on the right one at the beginning it might have sparked something, but after sending her a few lists I think the wood got wet.
One day, as I was going through a pile of old letters looking for something else that had nothing to do with Doris, I found something from my great-aunt Pam, Doris’s sister. In the letter, she happened to mention having been in school in Bedford. Ah-ha.
I found the Bedford School’s website and sent them a message using their general inquiry form. Weeks went by and I never heard back from them. This was all back in July. I realize now that school was out for the summer. In October, I wrote them again. Still nothing, so I started peppering them with daily emails to annoy them into responding. Finally, I heard back. Bedford, it turns out, is an all-boys school. Perhaps I should try Bedford Girls’ School.
Going through all the steps again, I went on the Bedford Girls’ School’s website and sent them a general inquiry. I heard nothing from them either. After a few days, I sent a group email to every single department head who was listed on the website. Finally, I heard back from someone. Their term had just started up as well. I was directed to Mrs. Emma Mackenzie.
Emma wrote me immediately. Their school term was just about to begin but she would forward my questions about my grandmother to the archivists. About a week later, I got the reply. Yes, Doris had gone to the school from 1920 to 1922, and remarkably, they had a class picture with her in it. They had several copies of it, would I like one?
The school Doris went to in 1920 was called Bedford High School. These days, it has merged with another school and become Bedford Girls’ School. BGS left the original campus some years ago and moved across the river. The original buildings, however, are all still there and a different school is now using them. That original location is not in as nice an area as it had been in the past. There is now a prison next door.
Along with the amazing news about the picture they also sent me the address of the rooming house where Doris had lived while she was there. It was run by a woman named Mrs. Partridge. The school also had my great-grandfather’s address in Bombay. Poor Doris, at fourteen years old, had to live with a strange person in a strange place while her parents were thousands of miles away.
My great-aunt Pam had also gone to Bedford, but as she and Doris were about nine years apart in age, they weren’t there at the same time. Pam was notable in the school’s history in that while she was there, she’d played a piano duet at the annual concert with another student named Janice Harrington. Janice had become a Ferry pilot who had been killed in a plane crash during World War II. Janice and the women she’d served with had only recently been recognized for their extraordinary courage and bravery with a retrospective exhibit in a nearby museum. The school was very proud to have had her as an alumna. I didn’t know Pam could play the piano.
Earlier this fall, Michael and I were already planning our trip to Scotland. As soon as I’d heard back from Emma, we added on a few days to visit Bedford. Emma invited me to visit and pick up the picture in person.
I had found two other addresses in town. One was for a house that was owned by my great-grandparents William and Stuart Ford Burrows,. that I found on a census report. The name Stuart confused me no end. I was sure somebody had made a mistake. Back in the day, as it turns out, it was common in Scottish families to give girls the name of male family members. I’m not sure who Stuart was named for as her father was named James and her grandfathers were named John and Henry. That information might prove to be helpful, though, in getting me further back. While she was alive, instead of calling her Stuart, everyone called her Foxy.
Bedford is a beautiful little market town on the River Great Ouse. There are lots of well-tended trees along its banks and plenty of swans paddling idly up and down it. Michael and I stayed in a lovely old hotel called, appropriately, the Swan.
After we checked in, we walked up to the address of Mrs. Partridge’s boarding house. While there were plenty of houses nearby from the right era, the actual house where she’d lived was, sadly, no longer there. It had been replaced by a more modern building.
We walked up to the original school location which was an easy walk from Mrs. Partridges and started nosing around. We found the main reception and went in just to see what we could find out. The receptionist there was incredibly kind. She was very interested in the history of the school buildings and more than happy to share what she knew with us. She ended up unexpectedly giving us a whole tour of the Victorian campus.
All the buildings my grandmother might have studied in were still there even though some had been added onto since her time. Inside the main hall, there was still a painted portrait of the headmistress who would have been in charge in the 1920s. The church where services would have been held every morning was also still there, but it had been deconsecrated and was now a student meeting hall.
Afterward, we walked back into the center of town, over the old stone bridge, and made our way down to the newer campus of the Bedford Girls’ School. It all looked very English with greens and hedgerows separating the different buildings. Emma met us at reception.
She was just as friendly as I was expecting. The hallways of the new school were lined with photographs from its past. None, that I could see, had either my grandmother or great-aunt in them, but many were from the same era. The one that struck me was an art class that looked like it was being held in a wood-framed attic somewhere. All the students were in long dresses and tight bodices. They are all looking up from their work as if they are waiting patiently for the photographer’s click so that they can get back to it. Who were all those young women, I wonder, and what became of them?
After two years of attending Bedford, Doris ended up going somewhere else to finish her schooling. Where, I am not sure yet. Emma gave me some suggestions of where to look that I have started following up on. Eventually, Doris went back to India where she met my grandfather. My grandfather was an incredibly shy man. My grandmother was many things, but being shy wasn’t one of them. I’m guessing that once she’d gotten him in her sights, he didn’t stand a chance. It was generally thought that she’d managed to marry up. My grandfather’s position was a higher one than Doris’s father’s.
My grandfather, Geoffrey was a tax collector and regional magistrate. As he was often the highest-ranking member of the government in some of the places they were stationed. my grandparents ended up being called upon to entertain visiting VIPs. Both Geoffrey and Doris played golf and I remember hearing stories about my grandmother playing a round with the Aga Khan. She was also often called upon to officiate at charity events.
They lived a grand colonial life. They were members of the local clubs. My grandmother was an amateur actress and I have a playbill from a performance she gave in a play called Hawk Island. One of the houses they lived in had a very high tunnel in the bottom of it which was a passageway for working elephants.
When World War II started, Doris volunteered as an ambulance driver in a medical unit. I have a lot of photographs of her in uniform. Eventually, as the political climate became more tense, Doris had to take my mother, my aunt Barbara, and my uncle Michael away from India and across to South Africa. My grandfather stayed behind to help facilitate the transfer of power from the British Raj to the newly independent government of India. Online, I was able to find a copy of the original ship manifest listing them all. When the war was over and the transfer completed, my grandfather followed them over and they settled permanently in South Africa.
Part of the appeal of working in India was that the government allowed you to retire after only twenty-five years of service with a full pension. With the end of the Raj, however, the British allowed the people who had facilitated the Indian transition to retire with full benefits even though they were shy of their full commitment. My grandfather originally tried to keep working. He was in his late forties after the handover, and he tried to get a job with a steel company, but they turned him down. After that, he seemed more than content to fully retire. He played chess, joined his mates for a few holes of golf, and read the newspapers down at the library.
That was not nearly enough excitement for my grandmother. South Africa did not have anywhere near the social whirl that she had been used to in India. Doris and Pam tried to open a fancy dress shop in Grahamstown, where they lived, but the local farmers’ wives were completely uninterested in their impractical clothes. The business soon went belly up. Doris’s frustration with this new provincial life must have contributed to her eventual decision to leave my grandfather. She never managed to achieve any sort of high social station again. When I knew her, she was working as a secretary to a Vice President at Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company.
My great-grandfather died in India. Doris’s mother moved to Bedford. Bedford was a popular town for Indian Civil Servants to go to. It was close to London and had several excellent schools besides the one my grandmother went to. Of course, if you’ve spent two and a half decades overseas, you really don’t know anybody back in the motherland. Towns like Bedford probably had quite a thriving community of ex-pats. They already had a townhouse there.
Michael and I tried to find that townhouse, but, sadly, it had been torn down as well. Across the street and next door were houses that most certainly had been there after World War II, so we could get an idea of what it might have been like – comfortable, middle-class housing.
My great-grandfather died early in 1951. My great-grandmother soon moved with her mother Marion into a smaller house a half mile away. That house is still there. There is a picture of Marion, Foxy, my grandmother, and my infant uncle Michael all together that I think may possibly have been taken in the garden behind it. Foxy died before the end of 1951 leaving my poor great-great-grandmother alone. Marion ended up in an elderly care facility just to the south in Bedford and lived to be a hundred and two. I have a newspaper article with a photograph celebrating her 98th birthday in the home.
Each little piece of information that I find helps make the whole story a little more complete. It’s like putting together an extremely difficult jigsaw puzzle and trying to figure out what the picture is when most of the pieces are missing.
I am so thankful to Emma Mackenzie for her generosity in giving me that picture. It’s rolled up and I am going to have to find somebody who can unroll it without it cracking and restore it. In the picture, Doris is sitting dutifully with her classmates. She’s staring out with not very much expression on her face. She couldn’t have been the only girl in the school on her own, but it still must have been a lonely and difficult time for her.
She lived quite a life. I’m grateful to have finally found at least one picture of my grandmother from her childhood. I am sure that there must be others out there.
Incredible research once again, Richard! I love the way you ‘peppered emails’ to get a response! I’ll remember this technique. How timely, also, so you and Michael could go to Bedford on your recent trip. The photos and information you’ve found are wonderful.
We’re going to see Dad in a couple of weeks to celebrate his 90th. I look forward to sharing this with him. Xx