{"id":407,"date":"2019-09-03T13:59:50","date_gmt":"2019-09-03T13:59:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stevensonfamily.club\/?page_id=407"},"modified":"2020-03-31T09:57:51","modified_gmt":"2020-03-31T09:57:51","slug":"mary-ellen-hampson","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/stevensonfamily.club\/index.php\/mary-ellen-hampson\/","title":{"rendered":"Mary Ellen Hampson"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Mary Ellen Hampson was my father’s mother and therefore my grandmother. The only memory I have of her was that of visiting her shortly before she passed away in 1956. I was only 5 and this is one of my earliest memories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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All Stevenson’s had this photo hanging in their living room. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Here are Kenny Marshall’s recollections of Mary Ellen Stevenson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Liverpool Courts our folk lived in were described as the worst slums in Europe.\u00a0\u00a0 There were 20-odd houses (we’d call them flats) grouped around a central court with just a single tap and a single lavatory to serve the eighty or so people living there.\u00a0\u00a0 Naturally, chamber pots were much in use and they were emptied into an open drain that ran down the centre of the court.\u00a0\u00a0 The cholera bugs must have rubbed their hands with delight when they saw that.\u00a0 Life expectancy in the early 1900s was just 19 so it was probably even lower in the 1870s-1890s.\u00a0\u00a0 They must have been as tough as old boots to survive.
Gran spent some time in a Catholic girls’ orphanage \u2013 probably after her Dad died.\u00a0\u00a0 She hated every minute of it and she grew to detest nuns and all they stood for.\u00a0\u00a0 In particular, she resented the way their public image was manipulated.\u00a0\u00a0 On Sundays they dressed in smart uniform dresses to be marched to St Mary’s Church, Highfield Street.\u00a0\u00a0 You can almost hear the locals admiring them, saying how well they were looked after.\u00a0\u00a0 But the minute they got back it was ‘off glad rags and on again with old rags’.\u00a0\u00a0 That sort of behaviour was probably common in those days.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We cannot find any records of her stay in the orphanage.\u00a0\u00a0 Not surprising really.\u00a0\u00a0 The church was noted for being very backward in coming forward with records.
Agnes (her mother) remarried in 1901 to William Lewis Jones.\u00a0\u00a0 Gran thought the world of him and he was known to her children as Grandad Jones.
Gran married Grandad in 1907.\u00a0\u00a0 They shared a house with the Browns for some years, probably so that the girls would be company for each other whilst their husbands were at sea, but as the families grew they moved into their own houses.\u00a0\u00a0 Mary Brown nee Fowler was Grandad’s half-sister.
Gran had 12 children.\u00a0\u00a0 The last, David, was born when she was 43, and the first grandchild, me, came along two years later.\u00a0\u00a0 Two of the children died in infancy.\u00a0\u00a0 She named her eldest daughter after the two grandmothers\u00a0 – Harriet Agnes \u2013 and she, my Mum, hated it for the rest of her life!\u00a0\u00a0 Harriet became her First Lieutenant, looking after the other kids whilst Gran had her babies.\u00a0\u00a0 The others called her Bossyboots.\u00a0\u00a0 Mum missed a lot of schooling \u2013 in those days and circumstances the authorities did not seem to be too bothered about it \u2013 and her one regret in her later life was not so much her lack of learning as the fact that she was a good swimmer and she never got the chance to achieve what she might have done.\u00a0\u00a0
The 1920s seem to have been their most prosperous years.\u00a0\u00a0 Grandad was a sea captain and by the end of the decade he was affluent enough to buy their own 12-roomed house (40 Newstead Road).\u00a0\u00a0 That was most unusual for the time.\u00a0\u00a0 I don’t think anyone else in the family owned their houses until long after the war, when the next generation had no option.\u00a0\u00a0 The house was big enough for Harriet to stay on after she was married and continue her role as Bossyboots.
In the 1930s life became a lot harder.\u00a0\u00a0 Grandad lost his job in the depression so their income dropped sharply.\u00a0\u00a0 The Great Depression hit seamen very hard as trade shrank and ships were laid up.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It was just as well that the older children were at work by then and able to add their meagre earnings to the kitty.\u00a0\u00a0 One of my earliest memories is of being woken up early in the morning by Gran shouting up the stairs to wake Lily and Mary for work.\u00a0\u00a0 Invariably she ended up coming upstairs, shouting all the way, and standing in their bedroom, which was diagonally opposite ours across the landing, until they did get up.\u00a0\u00a0 They really liked their kip those girls.
The 1940s were not good years, either.\u00a0\u00a0 The war brought shortages, queues, rationing and air raids.\u00a0 I remember one of my aunts getting ‘hysterics’ during an air raid.\u00a0 It was not the sound of the explosions that did it \u2013 by the time you heard them if you were still alive you were out of danger \u2013 but the whistle of the bombs as they came down.\u00a0\u00a0 In those days the cure was a sharp slap on the face.\u00a0 ( I wonder what it is in these PC days?)\u00a0\u00a0 I had never known Gran to smack any of her children but she gave this one a good right-hander.\u00a0\u00a0 It worked, but it must have upset her to do it.\u00a0\u00a0 Eventually, the bombing eased.\u00a0\u00a0 Then, in 1942, she lost Grandad.\u00a0\u00a0 In 1943 her latest son-in-law, Peter Morris, Lily’s husband, was killed during the invasion of Sicily.\u00a0\u00a0 In 1944 her son, George, came home from the tank battle at Caen without his legs.\u00a0\u00a0 And then, when the war was finally over, and things could be expected to slowly return to normal, she lost two sons, Jack and Albert, and a grandson, Norman, in the Penstone<\/em> disaster in 1948.
In the 1950s Gran was, technically, on her own.\u00a0\u00a0 All her children had grown up and married.\u00a0\u00a0 She still lived in what we used to call the kitchen.\u00a0 (It had been the kitchen in the glory days of the house, but by then the cooking was done in the large back kitchen.)\u00a0\u00a0 Lily and her family also lived in the house – in the rooms that we had used in the thirties and early forties –\u00a0 so she was never actually left alone, and her other daughters, especially Harriet and Mary, used to call in to see her every day.
From as long ago as I remember we had been taught that Gran had a weak heart so we mustn’t bother her, but she kept going until 1956.\u00a0\u00a0 She took ill whilst she was on holiday with Ruby, down in Becontree, but she had no intention of dying there.\u00a0\u00a0 I happened to be home on leave at the time so I went down with Mum to bring her back.\u00a0\u00a0 I must say that British Rail did an excellent job of looking after her.\u00a0\u00a0 We got a taxi in to Euston.\u00a0\u00a0 There we were met by a porter with a wheel chair who took her straight to a reserved carriage.\u00a0\u00a0 At the other end there was another wheelchair which took her to Uncle Bert’s taxi.\u00a0\u00a0 And so to our house.\u00a0\u00a0 Gran settled in and seemed to improve, but it was soon clear that she wanted to go Home.\u00a0\u00a0 She stayed with us for a while but, eventually, she got her way and was taken to 40 Newstead.\u00a0\u00a0 She held on there until Christmas was out of the way and then on December 28th <\/sup>\u00a0she departed this realm.\u00a0\u00a0 Rene remembers that when she was dying she reverted to her old religion and began reciting her Hail Marys. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mary Ellen Hampson was my father’s mother and therefore my grandmother. The only memory I have of her was that of visiting her shortly before she passed away in 1956. I was only 5 and this is one of my earliest memories. Here are Kenny Marshall’s recollections of Mary Ellen Stevenson. The Liverpool Courts our…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-templates\/full-width.php","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":""},"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":false,"thumbnail":false,"medium":false,"medium_large":false,"large":false,"1536x1536":false,"2048x2048":false,"post-thumbnail":false},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"WestergoDave","author_link":"http:\/\/stevensonfamily.club\/index.php\/author\/westergodave\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"Mary Ellen Hampson was my father’s mother and therefore my grandmother. The only memory I have of her was that of visiting her shortly before she passed away in 1956. I was only 5 and this is one of my earliest memories. Here are Kenny Marshall’s recollections of Mary Ellen Stevenson. The Liverpool Courts our...","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/stevensonfamily.club\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/407"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/stevensonfamily.club\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/stevensonfamily.club\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stevensonfamily.club\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stevensonfamily.club\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=407"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/stevensonfamily.club\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1258,"href":"http:\/\/stevensonfamily.club\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/407\/revisions\/1258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/stevensonfamily.club\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}