At 3am on 6 November 1897 Constable Walter Ramsbottom came off duty and headed back to the county police station in Widnes, where he lived with his wife Eliza, their two sons and three colleagues. Before retiring, he went to lock up but noticed that Constable Benson was missing. Seeing the door of his own living quarters ajar, he went to check that his family was safe. Turning on the light, he was shocked to find Benson in bed with his wife. Calling for another policeman, he threw Benson’s clothes out of the window and pulled him from under the bed where he was trying to hide. It may sound almost comical now, but the repercussions were to be catastrophic for all involved – and rippled down the generations.
More than a century later, Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine reader Lynda Giller was trying to make sense of her family history. One ancestor in particular – her father’s grandmother, Eliza Hargreaves – was proving elusive. “We always knew she’d been born Eliza Holt and her married name was Ramsbottom,” says Lynda. Eliza’s son Herbert, Lynda’s grandfather, was registered as Herbert Ramsbottom on his birth certificate, but at some point became Herbert Daniel Hargreaves, with Eliza taking this surname as well. “Little did anyone know of her colourful life and the secrets and lies that she used to reinvent herself.”
“The big mystery was why she started calling herself Hargreaves, and what had happened to Herbert’s father,” Lynda continues. “Occasionally when she’d had a drink, she would talk about her husband, saying he’d abandoned her, drowned – or even gone off to Australia taking their children with him.” She also said she’d been in service with a wealthy draper called Hargreaves, who was Herbert’s father.
Lynda discovered Eliza had been born in Bury, Lancashire, on 8 December 1862 to Edward Holt, a file cutter, and his wife Nancy. The 1871 census records show Eliza aged eight living with her maternal grandparents, while the 1881 census finds her at 18 living with her aunt. Then in 1885 Eliza married Walter Ramsbottom, a railway stoker, at the parish church in Bury.
In 1892 Walter joined the Lancashire County Police Force and the couple moved to Eccleston, where they lived at the police station. They had a son, John Ernest, in August that year. They moved again to Haslingden and then to Widnes, where their son Percy was born in 1894.
“But by the 1901 census, Eliza was calling herself Hargreaves, a widow, born Cornwall,” says Lynda, and she was living with her three-year-old son Herbert in Chorley. Lynda and her sister looked long and hard in an attempt to find out what had happened to the family – even enlisting the help of a researcher – without any luck.
It wasn’t until they pooled resources with a cousin that chinks started to appear in Eliza’s brick wall. “I was on Ancestry, so my cousin registered with Findmypast. She did a search for Eliza, and we were astounded when a divorce record popped up.”
“We were astounded when a divorce record popped up”
Divorces are very rare among the working classes because of the prohibitive cost. “The National Archives had the full papers. They were amazing – we managed to find out the details of the couple’s children. There’s a handwritten letter from Eliza in there as well, plus a statement from Walter.”
The divorce papers were very detailed and revealed that as well as John Ernest and Percy, the couple had had a stillborn baby, while another child, Walter, had died at 18 months. The documents also told how “between 20 Jan 1897 down to and including 6 November 1897 the respondent [Eliza] occasionally committed adultery with one William Henry Benson”. The divorce laws of that time were harsh – Walter walked away, taking the children with him.
So now Lynda knew why the couple divorced, and the name of Eliza’s lover. Was her story of a rich draper called Hargreaves pure Mills and Boon? “It was fantastic to find all that detail! William Henry Benson was still a mystery, because there weren’t any details about him in the documents. They didn’t even state where the adultery had taken place. There’s also a wonderful letter from Eliza, claiming: ‘I am not guilty of the charges made by my husband against me.’ The case went to court in the January, but Eliza couldn’t afford to go – not least because she was pregnant. Herbert was born in March.
“It was a real shock to find out the enormity of the thing – that she had lost her children, and was pregnant and alone. In 1898, this was a disaster.”
She had lost her children, and was pregnant and alone
Lynda managed to track down Walter’s police files at Lancashire Record Office. From these, she discovered that he had previously been “summonsed by his wife for assault”. This is why the couple had had to relocate from Haslingden to Widnes.
Such a dramatic story was pounced on by the press. “We’d trawled every William Henry Benson in the country – and there are loads. None of them fitted.
But I gave William and Eliza’s names to a friend who had access to the newspaper archives, and she found the story straight away.” The papers had picked over every sordid detail.
William, it turned out, was a policeman, and the adultery had happened at Widnes police station. “I sent for his details from the police records and discovered he was from Garstang, quite young and had previously been an agricultural labourer. His records say, ‘Dismissed for immorality. Found in bed with the wife of PC Ramsbottom.’ I felt quite sorry for him,” Lynda reveals.
Following his dismissal, William seems to have returned to his roots, later marrying and having a family. “My cousin tracked down his grave. When she visited, she saw someone had placed fresh flowers. She left a note saying who she was, and William’s grandson got in touch. Amazingly, he was a retired police inspector! He knew nothing about what had happened to his grandfather.”
As for Walter’s fate, an article in an old newspaper from 1900 shed some light: “The borough police force lost by death yesterday one of its smartest members, PC Walter Ramsbottom. He was a fine, well-built man, 35 years of age, and was only taken ill a week ago. Pneumonia developed and he succumbed yesterday afternoon. Additional pathos attached to the death, the fact that the deceased was married only a few weeks ago.”
Eliza’s sons stayed with Walter’s widow, who remarried. We don’t know if Eliza saw them again.
In the 1911 census for Chorley, she’s living with Herbert but admits to having three children – two of whom had died. “I find it upsetting just what an incredibly hard life she had. To lose her children, to lose her home overnight. I’ve got tremendous respect for her; she brought Herbert up on her own.”
The affair left its mark elsewhere on Lynda’s family tree. The girl Herbert eventually married, Lizzie Worsfold, was the daughter of another policeman – who, his police records revealed, had been working at Widnes Police Station around the time Herbert was conceived!
However, the adoption of the name Hargreaves was a hard puzzle to crack.
Herbert, Lynda discovered, had been baptised at St Mark’s Church in Antrobus, Cheshire. “It’s near Lostock Gralam, which my father mentioned in his journal. He said Eliza always used to say that she went into service there. I went along to the record office and asked to see the original entry in the registers. But when I found it, I thought ‘This is the wrong one’, because it said ‘Hargreaves’ and I was looking for ‘Ramsbottom’. Then I realised it actually read ‘Herbert Daniel Hargreaves Ramsbottom’.”
But where had the extra names ‘Daniel’ and ‘Hargreaves’ come from? “By sheer fluke, I looked back through the church records and found that a baby named William Daniel Hargreaves had died a few months previously.” Even stranger was the fact that William’s parents were the only other couple baptising a child, Wilhemina Frances, at the church on the day that Herbert was baptised. Was this where Eliza had got the name from? Was it a cynical move to leave her past behind – or did she know the Hargreaves and want to honour their son? We’ll never know.
Eliza, too, began using the name Hargreaves. Herbert’s baptism seems to have been pivotal – the point at which she reinvented herself and her son.
“It was surprising, but we were almost expecting some sort of scandal. My father always said she was very bright, but that she loved romantic fiction” – perhaps that’s where her stories about Walter’s absence came from.
Lynda is very philosophical about Eliza’s actions. “I certainly don’t think any less of her because of what happened,” she says. “I knew my father thought the world of her – he always said she was ‘the one who held the family together’.” And this far down the line, time often wears the deeds of our forebears smooth.