Annie was the 13th child born to my 2xgreat grandparents, and suffered several losses, including the death of her mother, while still young. She married towards the end of WW1 and lived the rest of her life in Lewisham. Newspaper coverage of her two daughters’ weddings suggest she had a keen and colourful fashion sense. Let’s meet her and her family.

Family losses

There are lots of facts and figures about Annie’s early life, but none can really encapsulate what she must have felt at the loss of three of her siblings and her mother. Annie was born on 17 June 1892, the 13th of my 2xgreat grandparents’ 19 children. I haven’t found a baptism record for her, but there is a school admission record for her at Rolls Road School, on 8 January 1900, when she was seven. This gives her date of birth. By then she had suffered the death of her day-old baby sister Mary Alice (1889-1889) and nine-month old sister Mary Ann (1895-1896). When she was 12 years old, her brother Richard Henry Stocking died at St Thomas’ Hospital in 1904; he was just a year older than her.

Her young life was upset again by the early death of her mother. Born Alice Mary Wales in 1857, she died aged 49 in 1907, when daughter Annie was 14 and her youngest child, Alexander, was just five. Shortly after, her widowed father, builder James Thomas Stocking, moved with his younger children from Herman Road in Camberwell to 18 Beechfield Road to live next door to his oldest son (my great grandfather James Aaron Stocking).

At the time of the 1911 census, she is the eldest of the family’s daughters still living at home. Aged 18, she is employed as a Collar Turner for a Shirt and Collar Maker. Perhaps working in the clothing industry fuelled the love of colourful clothing revealed in accounts of her daughters’ weddings?

Married life through two World Wars

In the Summer of 1918, towards the end of WW1, Annie married Francis Turner in Lewisham. Born in 1895, he may have been too young to participate in the War, at least at the beginning. He was 22 when they married. Their daughter Christina Alice Turner was born in Liverpool on 3 July 1919 (I don’t know what her mother and possibly father were doing in Liverpool at the time). A year later, her father James Thomas Stocking died.

At the time of the 1921 census, Francis Turner and his wife Annie Louise are living at 14 Beechfield Road, Catford, with daughter Christina, aged one year and 11 months. They are in the household of Annie’s sister and her husband, Frederick James and Lavinia Monk. Living in the same house, in addition to the Monks’ five sons, are the widow of Aaron Archibald Stocking, Annie’s older brother who was killed in action in 1917, and her young son Stanley Aaron Archibald Stocking. Francis Turner is working as a General Labourer for Construction firm Sir Robert McAlpine on the Bellingham Estate.

According to Wikipedia, London County Council developed a Cottage Estate on what was previously farmland in Bellingham between 1919 to 1923. It would have been a major construction project employing many at a time when the great depression meant unemployment was high.

In 1926, a second daughter, Frances Robina Turner, was born in Lewisham on 3 August.

It seems that Francis did not stick with construction for the rest of his life. At the time of The 1939 Register, aged 44, he was working as a Bus Driver for the London Passenger Transport Board. They are living at 29 Honley Road, Lewisham, where Annie is a housewife and their two daughters are still at home with them. The eldest is working as a Shop Assistant, while the younger daughter is 13, and still at school. Their dates of birth are consistent with other records. According to electoral registers, the family had moved to Honley Road by the mid-1930s, having spent some time earlier at Burford Road.

In 1940, their daughter Christina Alice Turner married John G Osborne in Lewisham. Their wedding was featured under the headline ‘Eastertide Weddings’ in The Lewisham Borough News of 27 March 1940 (see photo, left).

The bride’s sister Frances was chief bridesmaid, and her father gave her away. The family address is given as 29 Honley Road, and the bride’s mother reportedly wore a dress of petunia crepe-de-chine with coffee-coloured lace and a black straw hat – very elegant. The bridesmaids wore Victorian style dresses with cosy muffs. One of them was Valerie Catlow, granddaughter of her aunt Susan Caroline Catlow (nee Stocking). The reception was held at 96 Ringstead Road, ‘the home of the bride’s aunt’. This would have been the home of her mother’s sister Elizabeth Bridgetina Evans.

After the War, in 1947, younger daughter Frances Robina Turner also married at the same church to Edward John Thomas Copeland. The Lewisham Borough News of 12 August provided a photo of the happy couple (right) while the wedding was covered by a fulsome article in The Sydenham, Forest Hill & Penge Gazette on 8 August 1947, which reported that Mrs Turner, the bride’s mother, wore an “electric blue embossed dress with a brown hat trimmed with blue”. The “bridal attendants” included the bride’s married sister, Mrs C A Osborne and a Miss A C Osborne – probably Christina’s three-year old daughter Avril C Osborne. After a reception at the bride’s home attended by over 100 people, the couple headed off to Coombe Martin for their honeymoon.

Francis and Annie Turner stayed in Lewisham until his death, which was registered in the first quarter of 1962, although I don’t know their addresses in the intervening period. Annie Louise Turner died over a decade later, in Lewisham, on 24 June 1975, aged 83 and was cremated at Lewisham Cemetery.

Their eldest daughter Christina Alice Osborne was still living in Lewisham – at 270 Downham Way – by 1955, but at some point, moved to Berkshire, where she died in Slough in 2007. Younger daughter Frances Robina Copeland continued to live in Lewisham her whole life, like her parents, and died there in the Summer of 2006.