The Hampshire Family Historian | Volume 50 No.2 | Sept 2023

Member’s article

war and died in the Royal Hospital, Portsmouth, at the age of 55 on 28th February 1948. She was buried at Christchurch, Widley. Before her death she had lived at Hordean. She left two daughters, Doris May who married in 1947 and Irene Beryl, still unmarried at the time of her mother’s death. How Florence came to meet William Alfred Henry remains a mystery because she was born in Liverpool. Her father had Welsh roots but had been born in Liverpool as had her mother. In 1911, Florence was a labourer working in a rubber factory in Liverpool. It is possible that better jobs were available in Portsmouth as a result of so many men there responding to the call to serve the nation. Whatever, the reason, she moved south, met her husband to be, avoided the influenza pandemic, married and had a son all before the end of 1918. How close William Dewey was to members of Charles and Eliza’s family is also difficult to establish, but a faint clue is provided by the fact that in the early 1890s, Alice Eliza is listed as china and glass dealer. Could my great grandfather be instrumental in some way establishing her dealership? The 1881 census reveals that William’s father-in-law, Henry KEMP , who moved from Bures St Mary on the borders of Essex and Suffolk, was living at 22 Barbara Street, Islington. He was recorded as being an invalid, but his occupation was given as a china dealer! It is also noted that Alice Eliza married William Henry STRIDE , a mattress maker, some thirteen years her junior relatively late in life in 1897. She had been born in 1856 but in the 1891 census she claimed to be only 28! Perhaps this was a slip

of the pen. She must have been something like Susan Tall in Hardy’s ‘Far from the Maddening Crowd’ who was a ‘lady calling herself five and twenty, looked thirty, passed as thirty five, and was forty’. At the time of her wedding, Alice Eliza gave her age as 39, when she and her husband to be were living at 100 Newcome Road, Fratton in Portsmouth. There also remains a mystery of how Charles, the house painter, happened at the age of 59 in 1887 to die in Portsea Island Union Workhouse (later to become St Mary’s Hospital). Notice of his passing appeared twice in local newspapers. Firstly, on 24th September and then a week later on 1st October. The only other event that has so far come to notice about Charles is that in 1848 with a ten year old boy, he gave evidence in court regarding the theft of a hand of pork from a William Good, a butcher in Landport [Union Road, later Commercial Road -Ed]. Charles Ambrose, the house painter’s eldest son and named after his two grandfathers, was a hammerman in HM Dockyard. In 1879 he married Harriet Sarah FORD at Kent Street Baptist Chapel in Portsea, thus maintaining the nonconformist connection. They lived initially at 23 Cressy Road, Portsmouth. In the following year their first child, Ernest Charles Ford DEWEY , hereinafter mentioned as Ernest C, was born. Where he was born is not certain because one return indicated that it took place in Dunfermline, while in another place it is shown as Portsmouth. It is just possible that Ernest C was born in Scotland, because from time to time workers in the dockyard in

Portsmouth were moved from one establishment to another. Charles

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