A Stream of Lives

Six generations of a British family

Category: Birmingham

Redfern Davies and Sister Dora

20 December 2023 / / 0 Comments

Redfern Davies

Born in Birmingham in 1834, John Redfern Davies was the eldest son of John Birt Davies, the Birmingham coroner. A doctor, like his father, Redfern Davies was viewed by his contemporaries as one of the brightest and most able young British surgeons. After training in Birmingham, London and Paris, he was keen to devote his skills to helping the poor. He accepted a post as resident surgeon at the Birmingham workhouse infirmary.

One day in December 1860 he was thrown from his horse while on his way home from the workhouse, suffering concussion and serious injuries to his head and spine. After about six weeks his condition seemed to improve and he felt able to return to work, but he was still suffering intense neuralgic pain. He worked on for another year, but eventually decided to take an extended break in an attempt to regain his former state of health.

He travelled to the United States where he volunteered his services as surgeon to the Federal forces engaged in the American Civil War. He spent four months working at a hospital in the city of Frederick, Maryland, where he treated soldiers wounded in the bloody civil war battles of South Mountain and Antietam. There he gained a great deal of experience in the treatment of gunshot wounds, publishing papers in the Lancet and the British Medical Journal.

In 1863, he returned home and volunteered his services to Walsall Cottage Hospital. Walsall was a rough, dirty industrial town in the centre of the Black Country, about nine miles north of Birmingham. The small voluntary hospital specialised in treating workers in the hazardous heavy industries that had developed around the town. It was staffed by local doctors and resident nurses.  The nurses came from an Anglican order in north-east England. They had received little in the way of formal training, relying mainly on practical experience gained in a convalescent home.

Sister Dora

Redfern Davies joined the Walsall hospital at about the same time as vicar’s daughter, Dorothy Pattison, arrived there to take up her first proper nursing post. Dorothy, her nine sisters and two brothers had suffered unhappy childhoods at the hands of an excessively controlling father and timid mother. Her brothers had managed to escape the oppressive family home, but the girls had to put up with their father’s black moods and his strange determination that they should never marry. By time Dorothy was twenty-nine years old, she had known little of life beyond the gloomy rectory.

She had a long-held ambition to become a nurse. The only way she could see to achieving this was to join a religious order, so she left her home to sign up as a novice at the Anglican Sisterhood of the Good Samaritan based at Coatham, near Redcar. There she underwent rudimentary training and gained some practical nursing experience.

In 1865, still only a novice in the sisterhood, Dorothy was sent to Walsall Cottage Hospital to replace a nursing sister who had fallen ill. She immediately threw herself into the role heart and soul, impressing everyone with her energy and commitment. Local people had been suspicious of the sisters, questioning their motives for coming to Walsall, but Dorothy’s evident commitment to their health and welfare won them over. Known to everyone in Walsall as Sister Dora, she soon took charge of the hospital, working all hours to care for the patients and improve the nursing standards.

Engagement

Novices in the religious order did not have to take vows of celibacy and were free to marry. When Dorothy and Redfern Davies met, they were immediately attracted to each other. She was fascinated by his accounts of travels in Europe and America, and he taught her a great deal about diagnosis, treatments, surgical procedures and techniques. Both were independent, highly intelligent, idealistic and deeply committed to their patients. Both also possessed gifts of charm and persuasiveness. Eventually they agreed to marry.

However, they disagreed on religion. She retained a deep religious faith, but he was a humanist, a follower of Darwin and Huxley, who did not share her faith. Dorothy dreaded the thought of giving up her nursing career, as she would have to when she married. Reluctantly, after much introspection, she decided to break off the engagement. Redfern Davies’s reaction to this decision is not recorded, but on 15th October 1866 he resigned from the Walsall Cottage Hospital and returned to Birmingham. They were never to meet again.

Redfern Davies died on 3rd March 1867. His death was attributed to complications of the earlier riding accident, leading to an aneurysm. The Lancet said of him that ‘very few surgeons have displayed in the early years a more thorough appreciation of scientific surgery’. He was remembered fondly in Walsall too. The local press reported that he had performed his duties at the hospital with credit, referring to ‘his kindly disposition and gentlemanly manner’ which had won him many friends among his colleagues and his patients.

Meanwhile Dorothy remained resolutely single, continuing to deliver outstanding nursing care in Walsall until her death from breast cancer in 1878. She had achieved virtual cult status in the town and is still revered as a local heroine.  Admired by Florence Nightingale and George Eliot, a friend of her brother, some believe she was the model for Dorothea Brooke, heroine of Eliot’s Middlemarch. She is commemorated in a statue in Walsall town centre – the first ever statue of a non-Royal female erected in England.

The spinster and the orphan

16 April 2023 / / 0 Comments

Life could be tough for single women in the Victorian era, but Jane Kerr Davies was exceptionally self-assured. Eldest daughter of John Birt Davies, Jane never married, living at home with her parents until she was middle-aged. When her father died in 1878 she and her mother, Sarah, moved to a smaller house in Edgbaston. They lived there together until Sarah’s death four years later. She then took the remarkable step, for a single woman, of adopting a daughter.

Adoption was an informal business in those days. There were no legal requirements and abandoned or orphaned children were either looked after by relatives or fostered in baby farms, orphanages, charities or the workhouse.  Some of these children suffered neglect or worse. Philanthropists and social reformers took up the cause, setting up many charities whose mission was to help orphans.

The Infant Orphan Asylum at Wanstead was one of these charities. Queen Victoria was its patron and it gained the support of many eminent folk. Admissions were reserved for children of ‘respectable’ families. Unusual among Victorian orphanages, this establishment admitted babies as well as older children. There were always more candidates than places available. This painting by George Elgar Hicks shows relatives desperate to get places for children in a London orphanage when family bereavements left them caring for more children than they could cope with.  

An Infant Orphan Election at the London Tavern ‘Polling’ by George Elgar Hicks, 1865 [Museum of London]

One such child was Charlotte Rose Grabham, born on 22nd September 1882 and orphaned when she was just sixteen months old. Her parents, John Grabham, a professional singer, and his wife Louisa had been married for about eighteen years and had six living children at the time of Charlotte’s birth, but by January 1884 both parents were dead. There was no one who could look after the children so Charlotte and her elder sister, Adelaide, were admitted to the Wanstead orphanage.

How and why Jane Davies came to adopt this orphaned baby girl remains a mystery.  By 1884 she was living alone, having recently lost both her parents, three of her brothers and her youngest sister. She had inherited considerable wealth following these bereavements and may have wanted to put it to good use. No doubt she had given up any hope of marriage and maybe she was seeking companionship.

At any rate, Charlotte was taken into the comfortable surroundings of Jane’s Edgbaston home. It must have been a strange transition for the middle-aged spinster – Jane was about fifty at the time – to take on responsibility for a toddler. However, the arrangement seems to have worked well. Charlotte remained living with Jane into her mid-twenties when she married Jane’s nephew, Birt, son of Clement Davies.

Jane died on 17th September 1908, just seven months before Charlotte and Birt’s wedding. She left instructions that her body should be cremated at the Birmingham Crematorium without any religious ceremony and the ashes scattered in her garden. The bulk of her large estate was bequeathed to Charlotte, with the remainder to her nephews and nieces and to Birmingham University. Her will made it clear that if any one of her legatees became a Catholic or dabbled in ‘psychical purposes’, they would be dispossessed.

Pioneering athletes in Birmingham

8 August 2022 / / 0 Comments

Most spectators at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham would have been unaware of the city’s lengthy role in promoting athletics competitions. The Birmingham Athletic Club (BAC), one of the first British multi-sport clubs, was established in 1866. And 155 years ago, just one year after its launch, the BAC hosted the National Olympian Games in Birmingham, a precursor of the international Olympic games.  

The German Gymnasium, London, 1866

The club’s success was due in large part to the energetic efforts of two outstanding local athletes, Clement Davies and Joseph Hubbard.  Clement Davies was the son of John Birt Davies, professor of forensic medicine at Queen’s College and the first coroner of Birmingham. Educated at King Edward’s grammar school and Cambridge university where he developed his athletic skills, Clement excelled at jumping. At a sports day organised by the Birmingham Rifle Volunteers in May 1865, Clement, aged 23, won first prizes for the highest standing jump, longest running jump, vaulting the bar, and the sack race. He was also a keen boxer.

At another military sports display a few months later, participants were astonished to see a muscular young man push through the crowd of spectators into the arena. Uninvited, he proceeded to perform a series of elegant exercises on the horizontal bar, the like of which no one had seen before. The crowd, hugely impressed, demanded to know who the interloper was. His name was Joseph Hubbard, an employee of a local manufacturing firm, who had taught himself to perform astonishing athletic feats. Members of the BAC committee were so impressed that they sent him off to the German Gymnasium in London for training.

These two young men took the lead in getting the nascent athletics society off the ground. With Clement Davies as honorary secretary and Joseph Hubbard as chief trainer, or ‘professor’, the BAC organised its first gymnastics display in July 1866, drawing on advice from Ernst Ravenstein of the German Gymnastics Society.

Held at their makeshift gymnasium at Bingley Hall, the performances included running, leaping, vaulting and sack races, and exercises on the parallel bars. The club leased premises at Portland Road and the Kent Street baths, and other sports were added to their repertoire, including boxing, swimming and foxhunting. They recruited 250 members in their first year, as well as organising private classes for women and special sessions for schoolchildren.

The BAC was affiliated to the National Olympian Association (NOA), enabling members to compete in national contests. When the association was looking for a venue to hold its second national games, they were delighted to receive an offer from Birmingham. Clement Davies was appointed secretary of the NOA alongside his role at the BAC, with responsibility for organising the national competition.  Held over three days in June 1867, the NOA’s festival of sport began with a procession and ended with a grand ball. Competitors came from London, Manchester, Norwich, Derby, Newcastle, Leeds and elsewhere.

Various prizes were on offer, including ‘tilting at the ring’, in which horse riders galloped towards a cross-bar on which hung two small rings that they had to carry away on the end of a pointed lance. There were also running and jumping contests, wrestling and boxing, athletics, cricket, gymnastics and swimming. The event was considered a huge success and Clement Davies was commended for his ‘indefatigable energy’ in directing the proceedings.

Joseph Hubbard’s long career as an athlete and ‘professor of muscular science’ was still going strong in 1888. On the horizontal bar, parallel bars, and on horseback he was said to be ‘wonderfully good and no professional trapeze performer has been able to teach him anything’, so said the Birmingham Mail.

Clement Davies, my great grandfather, was too busy running his hardware factory to continue competing at a high level, but he remained actively involved in the BAC, being elected its vice-president and then president, a post he held until 1886. His interests expanded to include more sedentary activities, such as the card game whist, on which he published a book, but his support for the athletics club continued. He was a familiar figure at the annual gymastics displays at Birmingham Town Hall until the end of his life in May 1911.

Amateur athletics competition, 1865

Birmingham heritage

11 February 2022 / / 0 Comments

Just back from a trip to Birmingham to do more research for my forthcoming biography of John Birt Davies, Birmingham’s first coroner. The Wolfson Centre archives at Birmingham Central Library yielded some fascinating material, including microfilms of the register kept by Davies of the 30,000 inquests he presided over from 1839-1875.

I hadn’t been to the new library before. It’s extraordinary on the outside with its grey and gold layers covered in metal filigree rings – not my taste I have to say – but inside it’s stunning, with a circular design spanning ten levels. And almost every study space in the huge library was occupied, mainly by students, so it’s obviously providing a really useful service for young Brummies.

Tracing the coroner’s footsteps was more difficult. He arrived in Birmingham in 1822 after completing his medical training at Edinburgh University. He set up his first medical practice at 19 New Street, but no trace of the original building remains in this central shopping street. After his marriage to Sarah Redfern, the family home and medical practice moved to 25 Newhall Street where they lived until his retirement. Disappointingly few buildings from that era remain. Their last home was at 280 Hagley Road, Edgbaston, but that building has gone too.

Birmingham suffered greatly from bombing during WW2, but much of the destruction has happened since the 1960s. Those responsible for the mid-twentieth century developments favoured motor cars over pedestrians, but there’s been a change of heart since. Redevelopments at New Street Station and the Bullring are more successful, and the pedestrianisation of Centenary Square will be a triumph if it’s ever finished.

Most museums and galleries were shut at the time of our visit (Feb 2022), including the main museum in Chamberlain Square that I had very much wanted to see. It was undergoing renovation and there were signs of frantic activity to get everything ready in time for the 2022 Commonwealth Games, due to open in Birmingham on July 28th.

In Victorian times coroner’s inquests were held in pubs, often with the dead body present. I had hoped to find some of the old pubs still standing, particularly the Grand Turk in Ludgate Hill where many inquests took place, but sadly most have disappeared. I found just one where Davies had presided – the George and Dragon on the corner of Albion Street and Carver Street, now lovingly restored and renamed the Pig and Tail.

Old George and Dragon pub, now the Pig and Tail

Despite the wanton destruction of Birmingham’s heritage, I did make a few more exciting finds. These included the original site of the Birmingham and Midland Eye Hospital, that John Birt Davies helped to set up.

Old Birmingham Eye Hospital, now a hotel

The Davies family tomb in Edgbaston Old Church, with memorials to my great great grandfather, great grandfather and father is still there, as is the tomb of Clement and Ann Cotterill, my fourth great grandparents, in the graveyard of St Philip’s Cathedral.

Davies tomb at Edgbaston Old Church

And it was great to see once again the clocktower erected in honour of John Birt Davies still standing by the Five Ways roundabout. The clock had stopped, though, and it was in desperate need of a new coat of paint. Birmingham City Council – please wake up!

Clocktower at Five Ways, Birmingham, erected in honour of John Birt Davies

The life of John Birt Davies (1799-1878)

21 August 2021 / / 0 Comments

Having published mini-biographies of some of my ancestors, I’ve now got the family history bug. My next project is a full-length biography of John Birt Davies, Professor of Forensic Medicine at Queen’s College and Birmingham’s first coroner. A fascinating character, I could only scratch the surface of his remarkable achievements in A Stream of Lives. He definitely deserves more, so now I’m seeking to fill the following gaps in my knowledge.

Born in Hampshire, John spent most of his adult life in Birmingham, but his family roots lay in Cardiganshire, mid-Wales. Descended from Cardiganshire families on both his father’s and mother’s side, the family moved back there after his father’s death in 1812.

John was only 13 when his father, Thomas Davies, died. He was the eldest of seven children. They lived in the rural parish of Nately Scures and Newnham where Thomas was the rector. Finding herself a widow with seven small children, Martha, his mother, decided to move the family back to Wales to be close to her father, Alban Thomas Jones Gwynne, at Aberaeron.

Gap number one: I know Thomas died in December 1812, but when exactly did Martha and her children move to Wales? I believe they lived in a house called Tyglyn Aeron, very close to Alban’s house at Tyglyn Mansion. Did Alban own both these houses, or did he rent/buy Tyglyn Aeron specially for Martha and her family?

I know nothing about John Birt Davies’s early education. His family were English-speakers and Anglicans. Not a problem in Hampshire, but once they moved to Cardiganshire many of their neighbours would have spoken Welsh and attended non-conformist chapels.

Gap number two: Where did John Birt Davies go to school? Where were most English-speaking children educated in that part of Cardiganshire? Is it likely that John and his siblings learnt Welsh?

At some point John decided to train to become a doctor. He began his formal training at Edinburgh University in 1819, eventually graduating with an MD in 1822. In those days it was usual to take up an apprenticeship before undertaking formal medical training. Conveniently, Martha’s sister, Jane, was married to Christopher Arden, a surgeon/GP in Dorchester, Dorset. So John moved to Dorchester to become Christopher’s apprentice, but I do not know when he took up this position or how long he worked there.

Gap number three: When and for how long did John work for Christopher Arden in Dorchester? What was the usual length of time medical apprentices were expected to serve? Did they have to pay for their apprenticeship or did they earn a wage?

In addition to running the town’s medical practice, Christopher was a magistrate, a bailiff and six times Mayor of Dorchester. He also held an appointment as surgeon to Dorchester gaol. Clearly this busy man needed all the help he could get, so a bright apprentice must have been a boon. It seems possible that John helped look after the prisoners in Dorchester gaol and that his interest in forensic medicine stemmed from this period.

Gap number four? What duties were medical apprentices expected to take on? Is it likely that John was responsible for the medical care of prisoners in Dorchester gaol?

If you know the answers to any of these questions, or indeed have any snippets of information about John Birt Davies, please do get in touch. I’ll be hugely grateful for any suggestions that can help me move forward.

John Birt Davies

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