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Chapter one - page 2
By 1881 the two girls were back in Dawlish, Sophia living with a family as a child’s nurse and Katherine living with her grandfather and aunt, Catherine Radford who had taken over her mother’s work as a local washerwoman. Katherine in the census is described as assistant laundress. We know that Katherine Radford had difficulty walking, she may well have been born with a club foot, it is something we will never know for to her last day Katherine wore ground length skirts. But I have a first hand description of my grandmother, an old family friend Molly McDonald who knew my grandmother well told me that she was very lame and always walked with the aid of a stick. It is noticeable that in all photographs Katherine is either seated or leaning against something for support. After their marriage Catherine Liverton returned to London with her husband Alfred Keen where he was employed as a warehouse foreman, they soon had a family, my father Claude Stanley Griffiths Keen being their third and last child born in 1898. Katherine (Radford) Morris’s first born child, Elizabeth Gwendoline was also born in 1898 but in very different surroundings.
| Catherine Radford with her nieces, leaning against the bureau. My grandmother Katherine, standing beside her, Sophia Charlotte, the remaining two girls I am unsure about but one of them is almost certainly the sister’s cousin also named Sophia. |
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Claude arrived in the dreary, grimy and overcrowded streets of London’s Hackney, the great cities of England simply could not grow fast enough to contain the ever-expanding population. James Henry had served an apprenticeship with his uncle Cornelius Williams as an apothecary in his hometown of Pembroke Dock in Wales. The trade of an apothecary, I doubt very much if either Cornelius or James would have liked to hear me calling it that, was a fast dying one being a relic of mediaeval medicine when surgeons took their hairdressing activities more seriously than their medical duties. Suddenly no doubt spurred into action by the appalling conditions revealed by Florence Nightingale in the Crimean war of 1854 giant leaps were being made in medical knowledge. The apothecary who maybe best described as a cross between a herbalist and a chemist was running out of time, now universities were turning out qualified chemists, more acceptable to this new middle class population.
There was a solution to the poverty, sickness and overcrowding and many took it, the world of the Victorians was shrinking, in 1869 the opening of the Suez Canal halved the passage time to India, steam ships replaced sail, instead of months the time it took to reach far off lands was reduced to weeks. The solution was to emigrate; the most popular destination was America, Australia was not so popular, it still had its convict settlement past to overcome, least popular of all was Southern Africa. |
It was only some fourteen years before James and Katherine’s marriage that the British army suffered its worst defeat in Zululand at Isandlwana, an entire regiment was massacred by the Zulus.
The first British settlers to arrive in the Eastern Province landed at Algoa bay in 1820, since when there had been sporadic conflicts between these settlers and the Xosa people from the Transkei. The troop ship H.M.S. ‘Birkenhead’ dispatched to the Cape (South Africa, the Union of the Cape, Transvaal, Natal and Orange Free State only came into being in 1910) with reinforcements then ferrying troops from the Cape to the Eastern Province. Large scale settlement was much more recent in Natal, having only begun in large numbers in 1850. So quite what made James Henry and Katherine Morris decide to emigrate to the Cape cannot be said, was it stories told by James’s father who had called at Simonstown whilst an engineer on the ‘Birkenhead’ that kindled his interest. More likely it was the discovery of gold in the Transvaal and diamonds at Kimberly that drew them out but whatever the reason it was a courageous decision.. Another question that is unlikely to ever receive an answer, what on earth made James Henry settle first in the dry Karroo town of Oudtshoorn? It is not a large town today (the year of 2004) in the 1890’s it must barely have been a street - but it did have two things going for it, firstly it was the capital of the ostrich feather industry and secondly the new railway ran through the town.
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