Albert Charles Rice

Albert Charles Rice (also known as Charles Albert, born 1873) was the husband of Lizzie Constance Petter, who he married in 1897, when she was 20; he made a home for his widowed mother-in-law Marie Elizabeth Petter and her fifth child Archibald Graham Petter  

Albert Charles was a prosperous fur skin dresser and probably influenced Cecil Henry Petter to become a trader in furs for the Hudson’s Bay Company. By 1911 Charles had moved from the lower middle class address of Manor Road in Islington to the much higher class address of Methuen Park in Muswell Hill, the home from where Archibald Graham Petter was married to Violet Graham in 1911.

When Frederick Charles Petter died of pneumonia in 1893, aged 35, Marie was left, aged 34, with 7 (possibly 9) children. The eldest two (Lizzie Constance aged 16 and Frederick Charles Gervase aged 14) were put to a trade, Lizzie as a seamstress. That left Cecil Henry (11), Edith Mary (9), Archibald Graham (7), Harry (5) and Catherine (3), and possibly two more children (Mary Ann and Thomas) who we cannot trace. Were they taken in by one of Frederick Charles’ elder brothers (Walter Forster born 1854 and Arthur Lewis, born 1855) or his sister Kate (born 1859)? We do not know why did Archie, aged 11 at the time of Lizzie’s marriage, was the one to move in with his brother-in-law, and not also the other four known children. Presumably Charles Albert could not afford to support many of his wife’s brothers and sisters since by 1911 he had at least two children of his own (Frederick and Cecil – the 1901 census mentions an Albert born in 1899, but he is not on the 1911 census).

On 17 December 1922, when Charles Albert would have been 49, The London Gazette has a deed of assignment to creditors of the business of a fur and skin merchant of his name in Queen Street in Southwark in the City of London, a district associated with the fur trade since medieval times, so this may have been when he stopped trading.

Thanks Barbara 

six years later they did not live there.