The Hampshire Family Historian | Vol.48 No.3 | December 2021

Member’s article

Abbas where she met John. So, what happened to our two parlour maids and why did they have more in common than meets the eye? Matilda appears to have remained living at Farnborough and in 1884 she was a witness at the

Farnborough Park c1871 – OS Map reproduced with the kind permission of the National Library of Scotland.

marriage of her sister Emma at St. Peter’s Church to William HINKINS , a coachman from North Camp, Farnborough who would eventually be employed at nearby Hawley House (1901), while her brother William became the coachman to the Rt. Hon. Edmund WODEHOUSE , M.P at nearby Minley Grange. Her father John remained at Farnborough Park in 1891 but after the death of George Elliot in 1892 it became a boarding school under the tutelage of Charles LUPTON . John died at Camberley, Surrey in 1909. Many of Rosa’s siblings also remained living in the local area. Her brother William, for example, continued to work for the canal company and to live at Chequer’s Bridge into the 1920s. However, Rosa had moved away and in 1883 she was a servant to solicitor Charles Frederick CAMERON at ‘Ardmore’, 2 Southlands Road, Bromley Common in Kent. But there was more in common between Matilda and Rosa than the fact that both were born in 1862 and were working for Church of England clergymen in 1881 (one beginning his life in Winchester, the other ending his there), because within three years of the census both Matilda and Rosa had died and been buried in the churchyard associated with their 1881 employment. Rosa died at ‘Ardmore’ on the 19th September 1883 aged just 21 from what was described as “disease of blood vessels” and was buried on the 22nd September at

Christ Church, Crookham by the new incumbent Wilfred Wickham. On the 25th August 1884, nearly a year after the death of Rosa, Matilda died from a pulmonary haemorrhage after suffering tuberculosis for several months. As her death took place in Farnborough and was registered by her father, she most likely died at Farnborough Park Stables (now St. Michael’s Mews) in Rectory Road. Whether she was still working at the Rectory for the new incumbent Arthur Kinch when she fell ill is not known but she was buried on the 29th August at St. Peter’s, Farnborough by the Reverend Sutthery. She was aged 22. Carol Gomm (Member #14092) Farnborough Park – The stables now form three dwellings called St. Michael’s Mews.

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