Alice Amelia Stolliday (1877-1929).
My great-grand 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 on 22 June 1875 to labourer Frederick Feek and his wife Sarah Ann.
The 1911 census, which showed the family living at 131 Havelock Road, Great Yarmouth, listed Robert as a coal merchant. 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 of the offence.
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 from March 1915. The corps’ main responsibility was the care of the military’s horses, mules and pigeons.
The 1921 census listed the family at 45 Admiralty Road, Great Yarmouth, Robert still working for himself as a coal dealer and cab driver. He was sentenced to three months’ hard labour by Great Yarmouth magistrates in November 1927 (Buchan Observer and East Aberdeenshire Advertiser of 29 November 1927) for his part in stealing £15-worth of herrings from a Scottish fish curer. He had taken them late at night while an accomplice, who’d promised him 48 shillings for his efforts, kept watch.
Alice died in 1929 at the age of 51 at home 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 reported that Robert, who at that point was 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 Robert was temporarily of unsound mind. He was buried on 13 June 1934 at Caister Borough Cemetery.
Alice and Robert’s children were:
- Gladys Muriel Feek (1902-1985) was brought up in Great Yarmouth and married policeman Frank George Trollope there in 1929. The 1939 Register listed them in a flat in Bethel Street, Norwich, with Frank now a Sergeant Engineer. They lived in and around the city all their lives. Frank died in 1981, Gladys in 1985.
- Norman William Feek (1906-1979) was born in Great Yarmouth. He married Edna Florence Cox in Gunnersbury, Middlesex, in 1935, listed as a salesman and lived in the West London area. He died in 1979, Edna in 1994.
- Robert William Feek (1912-????) was born in Great Yarmouth and married Winifred Kathleen Edith Crouch in Gunnersbury, Middlesex, in 1934. He was an aircraft fitter at the time of the 1939 Register and were recorded in electoral registers after the war in Surrey and West London but what happened to them is unclear.
- Ronald Douglas Feek (1918-1990) was born in Great Yarmouth and died in Sheringham, Norfolk.
Sources: All data has been gathered from Ancestry.co.uk, FindMyPast.co.uk, British Newspaper Archive (titles in text) and Norfolk Family History Society records.