Alice Stevens, née Vlieland: A Victorian daughter, mother and wife
All three daughters of Jerome NicholasVlieland, Jr, were strong-featured, but Alice’s beauty was enhanced by the
determination in her face, which carried her through the sorrows of her life
from childhood to widowhood. Her daughter Marjorie says that ‘she could have
run the nation single-handed ... had she been given the opportunity’, and
Alice’s early life seems to have given her the resilience she showed at every
turn of fortune.
After his marriage to Frances Elizabeth Samworth in 1852, Alice’s father was firstly a curate at Great Ilford in Essex,
where her eldest sister Frances Elizabeth was born the following year. In 1854,
Jerome was appointed vicar of Christ Church, George Gilbert Scott’s striking
flint-faced newbuild on Turnham Green in West London; Alice’s elder sister Mary Heath was born there in 1854, she was born in 1856 and her brother Charles James in 1857. In 1858, Jerome became
the incumbent of St Mary’s Church in Stalisfield in Kent, but in August 1859 Alice’s
next brother was stillborn, and her sister Margaret lived only for one day in
January 1860. Two more brothers, Arthur Heath and Herbert Bloomfield, were born
in May 1861 and November 1862.
So by the time she was 4, Alice had lost
two siblings, and when she was 8, in August 1864, her mother died of a haemorrhage, aged 38, giving
birth to a stillborn sister. Frances and Mary were then 11 and 10, Charles 7,
Arthur 3 and Herbert 2. Until Jerome married Sarah Johnson in 1866, the
children seem to have been cared for by William and Phoebe Millen in nearby
Syndale, and perhaps also the Shove family in Queen Court Ospringe and the
Paxtons in Otterden: William Paxton, rector of St Lawrence the Martyr Church from 1851 to
1882, had no children of his own but Alice seems to have been very close to
both him and his new wife Mary. The Millen’s eldest daughter, Helena, born on
Christmas Day in 1858, lived only 18 months, leaving Alice Millen as the eldest
child and here may lie the roots of the edgy relationship between Alice and her
sister-in-law (as Alice Millen became when she married Charles James Vlielandin 1883): Alice Millen saw herself as superior
to the impoverished vicarage children, and later may have shared her husband’s
distaste at having a prosperous brewer as a brother-in-law.
On 27 January 1877, Jerome died of lung
congestion and liver disease, aged only 51. The vicarage passed to the new
incumbent, the furniture was sold, and the children scattered, Sarah going to
live in Aucher Villas in Canterbury, a charitable foundation for the widows of
the clergy. Mary then seems to have become the heart of the family, marrying
the eminent doctor Richard Shillitoe that November, from whose home in Hitchen,
Hertfordshire, first Frances in 1880 and
then Alice in 1887, were married (the 1881 census also briefly places Arthur there
as a medical student). Alice who, like
her grandmother Sarah Heath, may have
been a governess or a teacher after her father’s death, met Thomas PearmanStevens in Exeter in the mid-1880s. Beginning as an assistant brewer in the Swan
Brewery in St Thomas’ in the 1870s, he became as we know a partner in the Well
Park Brewery with his first wife’s two brothers, Hayward Gould and Thomas Gould
Pidsley. Their sister Ellen married Thomas in August 1874 and at her death in
May 1883, a fortnight after giving birth to her daughter Ellen Mary, left five children aged between 8 and a
newborn.
So when Alice married Thomas in March 1887 aged
31, she became stepmother to Mabel Marion, aged 12, Reginald Gould, 6 and
Violet Maud, 5; Allan Randolph, aged 7 and Ellen Mary, were later sent to live
with Herbert Vlieland in Wisconsin and then relatives in Alberta Canada, but
Alice still had to make a home for them and her own three children, Thomas,
Paul and Marjorie, born in 1888, 1889 and 1892, when she was 36. Marjorie tells
of a fulfilled family life until her father’s death in 1907, but Alice lived to
see the boys settled in their careers and Marjorie turned 21 before she died
aged 58 in early 1914.
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