After solving the minor mysteries of William’s name change and Alice’s peripatetic childhood, it was fairly easy to trace my maternal great grandparents’ married lives and growing family. I had a couple of family photos of them in old age and was pleased to find that their family home at Longfield Road, Sandy, was still standing and clearly visible at Google Street View.

Family life in the 19th and 20th centuries

After their marriage on 3 November 1893, William John Fage and his bride, Alice Cade, settled down to earning a living from labouring in the local market gardens and raising their family. They lived at Girtford Siding, Sandy, Bedfordshire until at least after my grandmother Elizabeth Sarah Fage‘s birth in October 1901. Before her, they had three other children: Frederick John Fage, in 1895; Albert Victor Fage (1897) and Jesse William Fage, born in 1899. They had three more children before the 1911 census. They were Jim Edward Fage (1904); Susan Elizabeth Fage (1906) and Annie Vera Fage in 1910, who was known as Vera throughout her life.

At the time of the 1911 census, they are enumerated at London Road, Sandy, where William John Fage is still working as a Market Gardener’s Labourer. They are with all the children apart from Fred, who was living with a Jesse and Sarah Tott, also at London Road, where he is described as ‘Nephew’ – although neither of his parents had a brother or sister with those names. Something to investigate further. William and Alice have not completed the information required on the census form about the length of their marriage and have said they have had six children born alive (actually it was seven, but perhaps they interpreted this as the number still living with them).

Extract from 1911 census (FindMyPast)

Longfield Road, Sandy: home for 25 years

Their youngest child, Violet Emma Fage, was born after the census, in 1913, in Sandy. The electoral register of 1914 shows William John Fage at Longfield Road, Sandy, a street which would remain their home for the next 25 years. In 1915, their son Jim Edward Fage died, aged 11. The death certificate is only available as a £12.50 PDF at present, and I have not found any newspaper references to his death, so do not know how he died.

Around the same time, their two older sons, Frederick John Fage and Albert Victor Fage, were both serving in France in WW1. Albert Victor Fage was a Prisoner of War in Germany in 1918, but returned home after the war, as did Fred. They both married soon after and raised families of their own.

At the time of the 1921 census, William John Fage and his wife are living at 14 Longfield Road, Sandy, on the edge of the hamlet of Girtford, off the St Neots Road. He is a Farm Labourer out of work, the name of his last employer, a Market Gardener, illegible. Apart from Albert Victor Fage and Susan Fage, all their surviving children are at home, including Frederick John Fage and his wife. Eight people are living in five rooms. Google Street View shows this part of the street as a series of terraced, brick built cottages, with no. 14 on the right, with the dark coloured door. An open doorway presumably leads to the back of the houses, while in front are neat, fenced gardens. A few doors along was no.10, known as ‘Haynes Cottage’, home to my paternal great grandmother Lavinia Brown.

The Lloyd George Domesday valuation records, compiled in 1914, show that where numbers 14-18 Longfield Road now stand was at that time just a building site, awaiting three cottages to be built by a Mr Haynes. Electoral registers show that the Fages occupied 1914 just after it was built, from 1914 onwards.

A newspaper account of my grandmother Elizabeth Sarah Fage’s marriage in 1923 shows that she and her parents were living at 18 Longfield Road. This may have been a journalistic mistake, or a temporary move, as by the time her sister Annie Vera Fage married Eric Beaumont Whiteman at Sandy in 1933, she and her parents are said to be of 14 Longfield Road again.

The photo below was passed to me by my grandmother Elizabeth Sarah Brown, and is said to show her parents William John Fage and his wife, born Alice Cade. It has been enhanced and colorised at MyHeritage. From her dress and hat, it is likely it was taken in the mid-late 1920s, possibly at a wedding. The building behind them looks very similar to the brickwork of their home on Longfield Road seen on Google Street View.

Of their own children’s marriages, the most likely occasion for the photo might be the wedding of Jesse William Fage and Emily Brown in August 1925. Their other children married early in the 1920s, or in the early-mid 1930s. In 1925, they would both have been around 53 years old.

The 1939 Register enumerates them at no.14, with the same neighbours that appear in electoral registers in the intervening years (although no house numbers appear in these), so it seems reasonable to believe that they lived at no.14 from the time it was built. Mrs Lavinia Brown is at no.10.

The outbreak of war sees no change in William John Fage’s occupation; he is still described as a Market Gardener’s Labourer. Living with him and his wife are their granddaughters, my Mum’s sisters Vera J Brown and Dorothy L Brown, who had been evacuated from Essex at the first signs of War.

This photo below of William John Fage was probably taken in the late 1930s, when he was in his mid-60s. Again, it has been enhanced and colorised at MyHeritage, and may have been taken on Longfield Road. Rather than his Sunday ‘best’ outfit as seen in the photo above, here William John Fage is dressed in his working clothes, the knees of his trousers worn through and covered in dust, a cigarette dangling from his lip.

This may have been one of the last photographs taken of him. In February 1940, five months after The 1939 Register was compiled, the tragic deaths of Alice Fage and her widower William John Fage rocked the family and their friends and neighbours.