Hannah Maria Stoliday (1851-1932), James William Bull (1850-1874), William James Thurgate and John Crisp.
My 2nd great-grand aunt and uncles.
Hannah was born to William Stoliday and Sarah Rose and baptised at All Saints’s Church in Salhouse, Norfolk, on 19 March 1851. She ended up with three marriages to her name, experienced tragedy and lived in London and County Durham, as well as Norfolk.
The 1871 census showed Maria living in Florence Place, Great Yarmouth, working as a servant in the home of widow and annuitant Eleanor Fowler. She doubtless met her first husband in the town, for she married James William Bull on 24 February 1873 at the town’s St Nicholas Church. A fisherman living at Row 123 in Yarmouth, he was a local boy born on 2 November 1850 to mariner James Bull and his wife Mary Ann.
Hannah’s marriage was cut tragically short, however, when her husband drowned on 8 April 1874, the result of a fight. The Norfolk News of 18 April 1874 reported that James was master of the smack Who’d-a-Thought-It and had been involved in an argument and fight with William Haines, the master of another Yarmouth-based vessel called the Peep o’ Day. The incident happened on board a third vessel, the Wanderer, while all of them were off the Dutch coast. The quarrel developed while the pair of them were below, but they soon came on deck and it was the Wanderer’s master who put a stop to the fight. However, it then resumed and while they were on deck James ended up going overboard and was lost. The Norwich Mercury, also of 18 April, noted that both men were worse the wear through drink and reported that police were investigating but I’ve found no follow-up.
Hannah then married fisherman William James Thurgate on 20 December 1877 at St Nicholas’s in Great Yarmouth. I’ve found few references to him in the records. The marriage record listed his father as butcher Wiliam James Thurgate but I’ve found no other documents to help identify him. Curiously the Yarmouth Independent of 14 July 1877 reported that a Hannah Thurgate had been fined 5s and costs for assaulting Mary Ann Attridge in Middlegate Street. Hannah had come out of a pub drunk, hit Mary Ann in the eye and knocked her to the ground. This suggests she was using the Thurgate surname before her actual marriage to William as no other woman lived locally at the time.
This wasn’t her only appearance in court. Hannah cropped up in a Norwich Mercury report of 15 March 1879, in which she was accused of assaulting Elizabeth Marsden in Great Yarmouth. Marsden claimed that while they were in a public house in Middlegate Street, she saw her husband with the defendant and remonstrated with him. At this point Hannah supposedly struck her several times in the face, knocking her down. However, Hannah said that Marsden had engaged in a struggle with her husband, during which her injuries were inflicted. The magistrates dismissed the case.
Then the Eastern Daily Press of 17 April 1880 noted that a beer house keeper named Louisa Lawson had complained that Hannah had abused her with foul language near the quay. However, Hannah produced witnesses to the contrary and she was found not guilty.
The Yarmouth Independent of 20 May 1882 then gave us a double dose of incidents, reporting that Hannah had been assaulted by well-known local character Jenny Soanes, who was sentenced to 21 days’ hard labour. Immediately after this case, Hannah faced a charge of assaulting another woman in an incident that led to the Soanes charge! She was found not guilty.
I can’t find William or Hannah in the 1881 census and William seems to disappear altogether. Hannah, though, turned up in the London area in 1887, marrying widower and mariner John Crisp on 5 January 1887 at Christ Church in Rotherhithe. Born in 1853, he came from Orford in Suffolk, where he’d been baptised on 19 March 1854 to labourer Edward Crisp and his wife Emma.. He was at sea, as Master, at the time of the 1891 and 1901 censuses. Hannah, meanwhile, was recorded living with step-daughter Eliza in South Shields, County Durham, in 1901. She and John would remain there for the rest of their lives.
Weirdly the couple married a second time, for in 1917 the wedding of Hannah Thurgate and John Crisp was registered in South Shields. Was this because there was something not quite right about their first ceremony? Was Hannah able to legitimately marry John in 1887? I say this because the Newcastle Daily Chronicle of 23 September 1893 reported that a William Thurgate had died in the town of Byker from cholera, and he was said to have visited Yarmouth and worked as a fish hawker. Reports suggested he was living in the area with his wife, but she wasn’t named. Could this man have been Hannah’s second husband. Had they separated but not divorced? Was the 1917 wedding an attempt by Hannah and John to put their wedding on a legal footing before they died? We’ll probably never know.
John was still at sea in 1921 when the census showed he was serving as first mate on the Holmside at South Shields. Hannah was living at home there but described herself as a widow for an unexplained reason. John died in 1923, with probate granted to Hannah. Hannah died in South Shields on 8 November 1932. She left effects valued at £1,327.
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).