Alice Amelia Stolliday (1877-1929) and Robert William Feek (1875-1934).
My great-grand aunt and uncle.
Alice died relatively young, leaving her husband so distraught that he took his own life.
She was born on 5 August 1877 in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, and baptised on 12 May 1878 at St Nicholas’s Church to parents Edward Stoliday and Harriet Goulty. She grew up amid the Row houses of the town, her father often away for periods of time at sea with the Yarmouth fishing fleet, and then married Robert William Feek in Great Yarmouth on 8 July 1901. He was from Flordon in Norfolk, born on 22 June 1875 to labourer Frederick Feek and his wife Sarah Ann.
The 1911 census, which showed the family living at 131 Havelock Road, Great Yarmouth, listed Robert as a coal merchant. But a few months later the Edinburgh Gazette of 31 October 1911 and various other publications reported on bankruptcy proceedings against Robert, a coal dealer, carter and cab driver.
Robert was no stranger to trouble having earlier had a brush with the law. The Eastern Evening News of 1 July 1908 reported that he’d been fined for causing a horse to be worked when unfit. The RSPCA had found the animal hauling an empty coal cart in Great Yarmouth under the charge of a man who was working for Robert, who claimed ignorance of the offence.
Robert served in the Army Veterinary Corps in the First World War, and his medal records showed him serving at least for a time in the Balkan and Macedonian theatre from March 1915. The corps’ main responsibility was the care of the military’s horses, mules and pigeons.
The 1921 census listed the family at 45 Admiralty Road, Great Yarmouth, Robert back to working for himself as a coal dealer and cab driver but he was in trouble again later in the decade. He was sentenced to three months’ hard labour by Great Yarmouth magistrates in November 1927 (Buchan Observer and East Aberdeenshire Advertiser of 29 November 1927) for his part in stealing almost £20-worth of herrings from the pickling plots of two Scottish fish curers. Feek told police had taken them late at night while an accomplice, who’d promised him 48 shillings for his efforts, kept watch.
Alice died in 1929 at the age of 51 at home and was buried at Caister to the north of Yarmouth on 7 March of that year. Robert died aged 58 in 1934 having drowned, his death recorded as suicide.
The Yarmouth Independent of 16 June 1934 reported that Robert, who at that point was living in a caravan at Yaxley Road, Runham Vauxhall, Norfolk, was seen to disappear beneath the surface of the River Bure by witness Daisy Rouse. She told the inquest that she’d seen him walking into the river, heard calls and then saw a man swimming and shouting as he was being carried away by the ebb tide. She ran for help but the victim gave a lurch and then disappeared beneath some piles.
Earlier, the court heard, a James Carter had seen Robert looking through some railings on North River Road, talking to himself. Witness Henry Clark added that he noticed the body of a man between a tug and the quayside while coaling the tug Royal Sovereign, so secured it and notified the police. PC Farrell visited Robert’s caravan after his death and found pools of blood on his pillow and on the floor, and the coroner heard that the body was found to have cuts to the neck inflicted before Robert drowned.
His son-in-law Frank Trollope had identified the body and told the inquest that 16 years earlier Robert had suffered a fractured skull as the result of a blow to his head. Five years before his death he’d also lost his wife. This had affected him greatly. Recently he had been thrown from his cart and injured again when a car drove into his cart, as reported in the Yarmouth Independent of 9 December 1933. Trollope said that Robert had never threatened to take his own life but at times had appeared strange in his manner. The coroner recorded a verdict of suicide while Robert was temporarily of unsound mind. He was buried on 13 June 1934 at Caister Cemetery.
Alice and Robert’s children were:
- Gladys Muriel Feek (1902-1985) was born in 1902 and brought up in Great Yarmouth. She married Frank George Trollope, who’d been born close to Kings Lynn in Norfolk in 1905, in Yarmouth in 1929. Early in his life he was a motor engineer but then became a policeman. The 1939 Register listed them in a flat in Bethel Street, Norwich, with Frank now a Sergeant Engineer. They lived in and around the city for many years. Frank died in 1981, Gladys in 1985.
- Norman William Feek (1906-1979) was born in Great Yarmouth in 1906. He married Edna Florence Cox in Gunnersbury, Middlesex, in 1935, listed as a salesman and together they lived in the Gunnersbury and Isleworth areas in what’s now West London. He died in 1979, Edna in 1994.
- Robert William Feek (1912-????) was born in Great Yarmouth in 1912 and married Winifred Kathleen Edith Crouch in Gunnersbury, Middlesex, in 1934. She’d been born in St Leonards in Sussex in 1913. He was an aircraft fitter living in Feltham at the time of the 1939 Register. The couple were recorded in electoral registers in Walton on Thames in Surrey into the early 1960s but then all trace is lost. Did they emigrate?
- Ronald Douglas Feek (1918-1990) was born in Great Yarmouth in 1918. He served with the military but what and where is unknown until his records surface. However, he married Marjorie Florence Theodora Body in Peshawar, then in India, in 1943. After the war, electoral rolls placed them in Aston Clinton, Buckinghamshire, but they were living in Sheringham, Norfolk, when Ronald died in 1990. Marjorie went to live in a care home for service families in Cromer, Norfolk, and died in 2020.
Sources: Birth, marriage, death and burial records including civil registrations from the General Register Office, census returns and other records at Ancestry.co.uk, Findmypast.co.uk and Norfolk Family History Society.
British Newspaper Archive (titles in text).
Parish register transcripts from the Presidency of Bengal: 1713-1948.