Maud Jane Wetherall (1881-1958) and Augustus Charles Towell (1882-1962).
My great-grand aunt and uncle.
Maud was born on 15 June 1881 in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, and baptised in the town’s St Nicholas’s Church on 29 November that year. She grew up with her parents Benjamin Thomas Wetherall and Sarah Ann Elizabeth Green and siblings in Admiralty Road.
By the 1901 Census she was living and working as a draper’s assistant at 27 High Street, Bromley, Kent. Why and how she ended up there is something of a mystery but Bromley must have been where she met her husband, the grandly named Augustus Charles Towell. He’d been born in the town in 1882, the son of electrical engineer Charles Towell and his wife Elizabeth, and worked as a solicitor’s clerk (1901 Census) and as a clerk with the London Savings Bank before marrying Maud in 1906.
Their subsequent children were born in various parts of London but the family were with Augustus’s parents in Park Road, Bromley, at the time of the 1911 census. By then Augustus was a civil servant with the Inland Revenue, where he continued to work until his retirement in 1945. The 1921 census placed him and two of his oldest children in Venner Road, Sydenham, Kent, while Maud was in Harrow on the Hill, Middlesex, visiting family with the two youngest. The 1939 Register listed them living at 131 Long Lane, Uxbridge, Middlesex, and the electoral roll showed they were still there in the 1950s.
Augustus was elected to the local council as a Conservative – the Uxbridge & West Drayton Gazette of 20 May 1949 reported his thanks to his supporters in the Hillingdon Central ward and his interventions on local issues were regularly reported afterwards. The edition of 29 June 1956 reported on the couple’s golden wedding, and noted that when they moved to the area their house was only the third to be built on their road. Augustus was noted for his service on Uxbridge Council and his chairmanship of the Civil Defence Committee. The paper reported that he was a keen gardener, had been the first president of the Hillingdon Court Horticultural Society and been a founder member of the Hillingdon Court Residents’ Association. Five of their seven grandchildren were present at their anniversary party, the two others were living with their father Eric in Australia. Their daughter Joan worked in the Foreign Office, according to the report.
Maud died in Middleton-on-Sea in Sussex on 12 March 1958 (reported in the West Sussex Gazette of 20 March 1958) and I’m assuming they had moved or were in the process of moving there to retire because Augustus died in Middleton on 30 October 1962, leaving effects worth about £4,319.
The couple’s children were:
- Kenneth Hubert Towell (1908-1959). Kenneth was born in West Norwood, Surrey, and married Dorothy Nellie Williams in 1931 in Uxbridge, Middlesex. The family were living in Brambledown Road, Wallington, in 1939, Kenneth working as an advertisement manager. He served in the Royal Army Service Corps in the Second World War and rose to be acting Captain. He was living in Hillingdon at the time of his death in 1959. Dorothy married Edward Furber in 1969 and died in Gwent, Wales, in 1990.
- Margaret Helen Towell (1910-1993), who was born in Teddington, Middlesex, and married Charles McAllister in Hillingdon, Middlesex, in 1934. He’d been born and baptised in Bengal, India, but was at boarding school in Taunton, Somerset, by the 1921 Census. The couple lived in Wandsworth, Surrey, for a time but electoral rolls showed them in Epsom, Surrey, from 1937. Home Guard records listed Charles there in 1941. Curiously, the family were in Exeter, Devon, for the 1939 Register but why is unclear. Charles died in Epsom in 1982, Margaret in 1993.
- Joan Maud Towell (1917-1987). Born in Sydenham, Kent, Joan was living with her parents in Uxbridge, Middlesex, at the time of the 1939 Register and remained unmarried. She worked as a civil servant, including with the RAF and at the Foreign Office. She lived with her father in Middleton-on-Sea in Sussex towards the end of his life. She died while living at Musbury, near Axminster, Devon, in 1987.
- Eric Augustus Towell (1921-????). Born in Bromley, Kent, Eric married Joan Ethel Harvey in Hillingdon, Middlesex, in 1942. He was serving in the Second World War with the Royal East Kent Regiment at the time, although the London Gazette reported that he had resigned his commission in December 1943 on the grounds of ill health. The couple moved with their family to Australia in 1952 and settled in New South Wales, where he worked as an architect (Uxbridge & West Drayton Gazette 29 June 1956). I believe Joan died back in London in 2006 but Eric’s fate is unknown to me.
Sources. Birth, marriage, death, burial, census, military and other records including civil registrations from the General Register Office at Ancestry.co.uk, Findmypast.co.uk and Norfolk Family History Society.
British Newspaper Archive (titles in text).