Alice Amelia Stolliday (1877-1929).
My 2nd great-aunt.
Alice died relatively young, leaving her husband so distraught that he took his own life.
She was born on 5 August 1877 in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, and baptised on 12 May 1878 at St Nicholas’s Church to parents Edward Stoliday and Harriet Goulty. She grew up in the town, her father often away for periods of time at sea with the Yarmouth fishing fleet, and then married Robert William Feek in Great Yarmouth on 8 July 1901. He was from Flordon in Norfolk, born in 1875. The 1911 census, which showed the family living at 131 Havelock Road, listed Robert as a coal merchant. But a few months later the Edinburgh Gazette of 31 October 1911 listed Robert, a coal dealer, carter and cab driver, as bankrupt. Robert had earlier had a brush with the law, with the Eastern Evening News of 1 July 1908 reporting that he had been fined for causing a horse to be worked when unfit. The RSPCA had found the horse hauling an empty coal cart in Great Yarmouth under the charge of a man who was working for Robert, who claimed ignorance.
Robert served in the Army Veterinary Corps in the First World War, and his medal records showed him serving at least for a time in the Balkan and Macedonian theatre of war from March 1915.
Alice died young in 1929 at the age of 51 at 45 Admiralty Road, Great Yarmouth, and was buried at Caister burial ground on 7 March of that year. Robert died aged 58 in 1934 having drowned, his death recorded as suicide.
The Yarmouth Independent of 16 June 1934 that Robert, a carter and living in a caravan at Yaxley Road, Runham Vauxhall, was seen to disappear beneath the surface of the River Bure by witness Daisy Rouse. She told the inquest that she’d seen Robert walking into the river, heard calls and then saw a man swimming and shouting as he was being carried away by the ebb tide. She ran for help but the victim gave a lurch and then disappeared beneath some piles.
Earlier, the court heard, a James Carter had seen Robert looking through some railings on North River Road, talking to himself. Witness Henry Clark added that he noticed the body of a man between a tug and the quayside while coaling the tug Royal Sovereign, so secured it and notified the police. PC Farrell visited Robert’s caravan after his death and found pools of blood on his pillow and on the floor, and the coroner heard that the body was found to have cuts to the neck inflicted before Robert drowned.
His son-in-law Frank Trollope had identified the body and told the inquest that 16 years earlier Robert had suffered a fractured skull as the result of a blow to his head. Five years before his death he’d also lost his wife. This had affected him greatly. Recently he had been thrown from his cart and injured again when a car drove into his cart, as reported in the Yarmouth Independent of 9 December 1933. Trollope said that Robert had never threatened to take his own life but at times had appeared strange in his manner. The coroner recorded a verdict of suicide while he was temporarily of unsound mind. Robert was buried on 13 June 1934 at Caister Borough Cemetery.
Their children included Gladys Muriel Feek (1902-1985), who married policeman Frank Trollope; Norman William Feek (1906-1979), who lived most of his life in West London; Robert William Feek (1912-????), who was an aircraft fitter at the time of the 1939 Register; and Ronald Douglas Feek (1918-1990), who served in the RAF.
Sources: All data has been gathered from Ancestry.co.uk, FindMyPast.co.uk, British Newspaper Archive and Norfolk Family History Society records.