LiveTheirStory

The North Witchford Board of Guardians were quite active in ensuring that the poor of Chatteris and its district were taken care of. Their story is ostensibly one of respectable men (and the occasional woman, in the case of child abandonment) acting as the safety net for those falling sick or into poverty, but such charity cost money, and some of the decisions, recorded in their minutes and ledger book, strike me as hard-headed and ethically ambiguous.

Such a case is that of Sarah Ann Blowers. In March 1919 the Guardians’ Receiving Officer, Edwin Richardson, reported that Sarah Ann Blowers had been ‘found by me’ in her home at 2 Lyons Yard, Chatteris. She moved to the Doddington institution, where she remained until her death in February 1920. As we have seen in the post relating to Henry Skeels, the Guardians were quick to charge family members for the care of their relatives, but Sarah was by that time widowed, and in the absence of anyone to support her the Receiver took drastic measures.

Sarah Ann’s furniture and other possessions were placed in the weekly auction held by Sewards in Chatteris just a month after she entered the workhouse, that is, while she was still alive, and the proceeds, net of commission and paying off her rent bill, came to £18 19s and 8d, which was paid to Mr Richardson on the Guardians’ behalf.

Read charitably, these actions were helping a vulnerable old lady of 70, who had been living alone for at least eight years, settle her affairs and receive care for the last year of her life. Being at Doddington would also guarantee her a pauper’s funeral, but nothing in the surviving minute book suggests she was unwell. How far did she have any say in the decision to sell her things and render her effectively homeless unless she stayed at Doddington? One wonders whether Mr Richardson assumed she was closer to death than she actually was, and booked in the auction accordingly? If so, the plan backfired as Sarah Ann lived on for nearly a year, and the nearly £19 raised probably just about covered her maintenance for 330 days and the funeral, with very little left over.

It seems the whole story of Sarah Ann’s vulnerability derives from Mr Richardson’s statement that she was ‘found’, justifying his subsequent actions. Since we don’t have anything from Sarah herself, this post will end with a quick life story as her memorial, a life story which suggests she was anything but vulnerable.

Born Sarah Ann Jefferson in Outwell, Norfolk, Sarah moved to Chatteris sometime before 1871, when she was living in Hive Lane with her aunt, a lady of private means. The following year she married William Blowers, a shoemaker from Littleport. I have not been able to find any evidence of children, and in 1891 the couple had taken in a lodger, who was working at what would become Chatteris Engineering. In 1900 William died, but Sarah continued to take in lodgers, in 1901 a young bricklayer. By the 1911 census she was living alone on ‘private means’ in two rooms in Hive Lane. When she moved to Lyons Yard is unclear, though its proximity to Hive Lane may mean Mr Richardson was more precise about her address than the census taker.

Living alone did not in itself make her vulnerable – many women, young and old, in Chatteris were in much the same situation after the Great War – but perhaps she had indeed succumbed to illness. We should remember that spring 1919 came at the end of the deadliest wave of the ‘flu pandemic of 1918, and it is not unfeasible to suggest that Mr Richardson, in his other job as Registrar of Births and Deaths for North Witchford, had already seen a few deaths. His ‘finding’ of Sarah Ann, however, makes her more visible in the archive, and offers us an interesting case study in early 20th-century ‘charity’.