Actor Rose Ayling-Ellis was born on 17 November 1994 in Hythe in Kent and is 29 years old. She is best known for acting on EastEnders, where she was the first deaf actor to play a regular character, and winning Strictly Come Dancing in 2021.
After playing barmaid Frankie Lewis in EastEnders, Rose says at the start of her episode of Who Do You Think You Are? that she’s intrigued by a family photograph of a “big and strong” woman who she thinks owned a pub, like the Queen Victoria in EastEnders. More generally, she says, she wants to find out: “Is there any drama? I like a bit of drama.”
To start, Rose visits her mother Donna. Donna can remember her great grandmother, Gertrude Chilton. She has the photographs of the “big, strong woman”, who was Gertrude’s mother, Rose’s 3x great grandmother. She was from Birmingham and Donna thinks she did run a pub, but she doesn’t know her name.
To find out, Rose goes to Birmingham, where she meets local historian Simon Briarcliffe. He shows her Gertrude’s birth certificate, which says that her parents were Alfred and Agnes Chilton. William’s profession on the birth certificate is ‘jeweller’, but they also ran a pub, the Sandy Hill. Agnes would have had to be tough, as she had to run the pub while William worked at his other job and also had six children.
William and Agnes moved on to running another pub, the King’s Arms. An old newspaper article reports that William was fined for assault after an incident where both he and Agnes slapped a customer in the face.
“It’s kind of like EastEnders, at the Queen Victoria pub,” Rose jokes. “Everyone slapped each other all the time in that pub.”
However, William died at the age of 48, leaving Agnes in a precarious financial situation. Trade directories show that by 1904 Agnes was running a new pub, the Aston Tavern. The pub is still standing and Rose visits it to find out more. She meets historian Professor Julie-Marie Strange, who tells her that the Aston Tavern was a bigger and more upmarket pub. Agnes was probably able to buy it with William’s life insurance money. She also got remarried two years later to Thomas George Harris. As a woman running a pub, Agnes risked being seen as unrespectable, and getting remarried would help her reputation. Julie-Marie even has a wedding photograph showing a fancy wedding in the pub garden! Agnes also tried to make the pub more respectable by using it to organise social events. One of the photographs Rose has shows the Aston Tavern bowling club.
Sadly, Thomas Harris died just three years later. However, Agnes was able to pay for an extension to the pub with the money she inherited from him. The pub now offers bedrooms named after the previous pub owners – including Agnes.
“I just feel really privileged to learn so much about this woman,” Rose says. “It must have been really difficult to cope with two deaths of her husbands. But she’s resilient. It’s not about her husband. It’s about herself. And it’s about who she is, and what she wants to do. And she’s just doing it. And I like that.”
Next, Rose goes to Somerset to see her father and grandmother. Rose’s grandmother Pam shows her a picture of her grandparents James and Ada Welland with their children. She says that James only had one hand and she thinks he was injured while working on the railways.
Rose goes to STEAM, the Museum of the Great Western Railway in Swindon, where she meets railway historian Dr Mike Esbester. He tells her that James lost his hand at just 19 when it was crushed by a train. Working on the railways at the time was very dangerous – in 1899, the year of James’ accident, over 16,000 railway workers were injured or killed. Under the recently-passed Workmen’s Compensation Act James made a claim for £250 from Great Western Railway, but the claim was denied.
Next, Rose goes to Exeter, where James lived. At Exeter’s Guildhall, she meets historian Dr Eve Worth. She tells her that in the 1921 census James was living in Paul Street, a slum, with a large family, having to work as a porter to support them.
The slum was marked for clearance, leaving the Welland family without a home. Board of Guardians minutes from 1923 show the family were given housing in a formerly empty part of the local workhouse. In 1929, the family was ordered to leave their accommodation after a complaint about noise, but they refused to leave. Luckily, in 1930 the Local Government Act passed, which required councils to provide homes. The Welland family were able to move into new council housing. James was still living there when he died in the late 1940s at the age of 66.
Finally, Rose wants to find out about her paternal grandfather Gerry Ellis, and whether it’s true that that line of the family has Italian ancestry. Looking at records, she finds that her 4x great grandfather was called Pasquel Lyons. He was living with his family in South Molton in Devon in the 1840s.
Rose goes to South Molton and meets historian Dr Oskar Jensen. He confirms that the 1851 census records say that Pasquel was born in Italy.
Pasquel worked as a jewellery hawker. He sold jewellery around Devon for decades, finally dying in 1882.
“It’s been such a lovely journey, finding out so much about my family,” Rose says. “When you hear the stories, it makes them all very real and very human. So my life that I have at the moment will become a story one day for a generation to come. And me hearing their stories inspires me, hoping that my story will be incredible for whoever is in my family tree, for the future.”