Sunday 14 March 2021

Alice Stevens, née Vlieland: A Victorian daughter, mother and wife

 

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.

 

 Thanks to Barbara and Gilly and Ray and many more researchers most of all  family and tellers of our family story.

 

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