A Class Apart
Written and researched by volunteer Derek Turner, with assistance from the Panacea Charitable Trust's Archivist Vicki Manners and support from Bedfordshire Archives.
Around 1900, meeting neighbours was an everyday experience and most could be expected to be ‘people like us’, so it is worthwhile to discover how the Barltrops compared with their neighbours when they arrived in 1906 at Albany Road, part of the Bower Estate. Also, because they have been described as Victorian in many ways, it is worth exploring what Mabel Barltrop and her family had in common with earlier residents.
The Barltrops were middle class, but there were gradations between the lower-middle, middle and upper-middle classes. The distinctions were subtle and related to lineage, occupation, wealth, accent and use of language.
Class distinctions were also evident in the size of houses and the number of household servants. Defining an individual’s exact position in the middle classes is difficult; the boundaries could be fluid as Mabel’s own fluctuating social status illustrates. She was born into a solidly middle-class family; having some wealthy and quite celebrated relatives notched her up the hierarchy a little. Despite the premature death of her father, her widowed mother had an annual income well above the middle-class average, but in marrying a young curate, the son of a blacksmith, who never acquired a living and who at his premature death was unemployed leaving her a young widow with four children, Mabel slid down to a lower level than her two wealthier friends living nearby.
The three tiers of the middle classes can be distinguished in the records by the number of rooms in their houses and the number of their household servants, for the lower-middle class, up to eight rooms and one servant, for the middle class 9 to 12 rooms and two or three servants, and more than 12 rooms and four or more servants for the upper-middle class.
New roads, new names - the Bower Estate
Between the early 1880s and 1900, the Bower Estate was built to provide modern homes for the middle classes.
St Cuthbert’s parish OS map surveyed 1881/2, published 1884. National Library of Scotland
The brainchild of George Bower, a gas engineer turned housing developer, it stretched from Goldington Road in the north to the Embankment in the south and from Brewer Street in the east to Newnham Road in the west. After defaulting on his mortgage, Bower went bankrupt and the Wade-Gery family, which previously owned the land and had provided the loan, parcelled out the unsold lots to other builders.
Spacious houses in the Rothsays and Bushfield Avenue were built exclusively for the wealthier middle classes. Bower Street and Howbury Street were for the less wealthy. Albany and Waterloo Roads became hybrids, containing houses of various sizes. In Albany Street, the two large houses Numbers 1 and 2 adjacent to the Embankment were designed for the upper classes, the remainder were for the middle, or lower middle such as Number 12.
 Bower Estate south of Castle Road, 1900. |
Some of the roads’ names changed, seemingly as result of class grading. The Embankment was originally called both Thames Street and Waterloo. Albany Road was Albany Street until 1905; Gery Street became Waterloo Road in 1902. ‘Streets’ were for the lower-middle classes lived. ‘Roads’ contained houses for the middle classes. The wealthiest lived in ‘Avenues’ such as Bushmead.
Lower-middle, middle and upper-middle class in Albany Road
Two storeys.
Two-and-a-half storeys
Three storeys
To achieve their aim of an exclusively middle-class estate, the Wade-Gerys laid down detailed rules about the nature of the houses and the kind of people who were to live there.
“No purchaser shall at any time carry on or permit to be carried on the business of innkeeper or victualler or retailer of wines, spirits or beer. ... No trade or profession other than barrister, solicitor, physician, apothecary, architect, surveyor or surgeon shall be carried on in any of the lots”.
Newnham Road and the Embankment
Two houses in Newnham Road, later acquired by the Panaceans, were close to the Barltrops’ home and a part of the Bower Estate, but in 1906 the houses and residents were quite different in character to the rest of the estate.
Number 11, the Haven, earlier called ‘Leithen’ was owned by a wealthy widow, Henrietta Hollingworth. Number 9, Castleside, was a boarding house for younger pupils of Bedford School. The only likely contact was complaints by Mabel, who hated noise, about the racket the schoolboys were making. The Embankment too was a different world; its only connection with the Barltrops was that Arthur’s sister Helena (Lennie) lived at Number 26.
The Barltrops’ neighbours before the Panaceans 1881-1911
The Barltrops had moved into a lower-middle-class home appropriate for a curate and his family in a thriving town, popular for its good and affordable public schools and its new middle-class housing. It would not be surprising that they and their new neighbours in Albany Road and Gery Street had much in common. Mabel interacted with the neighbours before she became Octavia and would have discovered that some of the neighbours were like her.
In 1901, the residents of the houses in Albany Road were an equal mixture two groups, locals and incomers, some of them from Ireland in 1901. Ten years later the residents, like the Barltops, were overwhelmingly incomers, mostly from the UK but one Austrian, whose children had been born in India and Burma but were British subjects. There were many others from abroad in Waterloo Road, families that had lived in the British Empire, in India especially, with husbands who might still be there, but who were now coming ‘home’ to retire early after having married late to a town with good but affordable Public Schools for their children. These ‘imperial’ incomers had little in common with the Bartrops other than having children to be educated, and they mainly lived in the larger Waterloo Road houses.
In a third group, the Barltrops’ closest residents in Albany Road and the western end of Waterloo Road in the more modest houses lived “surplus women”. Nationally, 40 percent of women had either failed to find husbands or they were widows whose husbands had died young In 1891 more than half of the 35 households in Waterloo Road were headed by women, mostly widows of widely varying ages, one only 30. In 1907 ten of the 27 households in Albany Road were headed by widows; most were considerably older than Mabel, but three had under-age children to look after. In Waterloo Road, there was just one wife of similar age with four children but an absent husband and nine widows, five of whom had of them had children under 18.
Mabel’s situation could be said to have been quite typical of the immediate neighburhood for by the time she was discharged from hospital in January 1907, she had joined the ranks of young widows. She was 40 years old, had four children, an aged aunt Fanny to look after and not a great deal of money. Arthur’s estate amunted to a modest £461 7s 10d, though Fanny was quite well off.
Some four years on, the situation had changed slightly. In Waterloo Road there were still nine widows, but only three that had under-age children. In Albany Road the change was more marked; the number of widows had dropped to six and just one had an under-age child, though there were two married women under the age of 40 with children. Mabel, as a widow still with three under-age children – and the eldest still living at home – was now the odd one out.
Only a minority of residents owned their houses. In 1902 on three houses in Albany Road were owned. Eight years later, this had reduced to two. The remaining 24 houses, including Number 12, were rented. Most people rented them for just a short period. For example, during the 12 months after November 1902 five houses had new occupants. The Barltrops were unusual in renting for more than a decade before buying their house. Whether renters or owners, Albany Road and Waterloo Road were havens for both young middle-class families and for relatively well-off widows and spinsters “living off their own means’.
During her early years in Bedford, Mabel interacted a good deal with the community. She was president of a local literary circle, she helped out at St Paul’s Church and made many friends in the town including Kate Firth, who lived in nearby Bushmead Avenue, and Ellen Oliver, who lived at Number 7 Rothsay Road. Both had houses substantially larger than Mabel’s.
To sum up, Mabel’s relationship with her neighbours bore a close resemblance in several ways to many neighbouring households in the late 19th and early 20th century, but by 1911 these had evolved whereas her situation remained the same.
In one respect the road’s female population in 1911 foreshadowed the characteristics of the early Panacean ladies a decade later in that the majority were in their 60s or older and living in all-female or nearly all-female households. The difference lay in their marital status, widow rather than spinster and, of course, their religious beliefs.
