Arthur Albert Stolliday (1875-1935) and Elizabeth Mary Ann Wetherall (1876-1952)

Arthur Albert Stolliday (1875-1935) and Elizabeth Mary Ann Wetherall (1876-1952).
My great-grandparents. 

Arthur Stolliday was a colourful character and a Norfolk lad – born on 12 May 1875 in Row 123, Great Yarmouth, to Edward Stoliday and Harriet Goulty. He served in the First World War, worked behind the bar in various pubs, got into trouble with the law and moved his family to London.

Arthur, his parents and siblings were living in Row 112 by the time of the 1891 census, and by then he was working as a fishmonger. The rows were a network of 145 very narrow streets in Great Yarmouth that ran parallel to each other and became increasingly poverty-ridden as the years went on. Around this time the Norwich Mercury of 16 May 1891 reported that Arthur had been a key witness in the death of a six-year-old boy, John Owen Mitchell, on the town’s South Quay. Arthur told the inquest that Mitchell had been playing on railway trucks, and was standing on the buffers while others pushed him along. But he fell when the truck collided with another, hit his head badly and died shortly after in hospital. Arthur had run to help him but couldn’t save the lad.

He married Elizabeth Mary Ann Wetherall on 28 April 1897 in St Nicholas Church, Yarmouth. She’d been born in 1876 in Great Yarmouth to Benjamin Wetherall, a ship’s carpenter, and Sarah Green. As a teenager she worked as a machinist. In 1901 the Stollidays were living at 64 Winifred Road, Gorleston, south of Yarmouth, with their new family and he’d become a licensed victualler’s assistant – which probably meant he was a barman. He was then the licensee of the Bricklayers Arms in Victoria Road, Yarmouth, until 1903 but by September of that year Arthur was in financial trouble thanks to his gambling. Reports in The London Gazette show bankruptcy proceedings being taken out against him. This resulted in him being replaced as licensee by a George Symonds.

The 7 November 1903 edition of the Norwich Mercury reported that Arthur’s problems stemmed from betting. With liabilities of more than £172, he told a Yarmouth bankruptcy hearing that he’d been a barman for 13 years and had taken over the pub at the end of 1901 ‘without capital’. The paper reported: “He did this at the suggestion of Mr Ives, a bookmaker, who used the house. Mr Ives advanced him £45 to go into the house and he repaid it in three months” but “he got into the net himself through keeping what was known as a betting house, and his losses in betting were entirely the cause of his failure. He betted continuously from the time he entered the house, and had no idea of what he had lost. He sold his furniture for £15 when he found he could not go on, and then filed his petition.”

How his small family must’ve coped with this is anybody’s guess. A year after the hearings he was working again as a barman, according to a note on his child Frank’s death certificate, dated 23 September 1904. At that time the family was living at 32 Camden Road, Yarmouth.

School records for daughter Lily showed they were living at 14 Northampton Place in 1908, when a note in her file records that she left the school on 30 July as a result of the family leaving the district. This may be when the family moved to Penge and Sydenham in south London, for the 1911 census showed Arthur working as a licensed victualler’s assistant, living in a five-roomed house at 46 Raleigh Road, Penge. Electoral roll records show him registered there in 1913 but school records for his children suggest the family had moved back to Norfolk the year before. I’ve no idea why he moved so far from home but maybe he saw greater opportunities closer to the capital and wanted an escape from the disappointments of his past.

With the advent of the First World War, Arthur was in Great Yarmouth and he’s recorded on 27 May 1915 enlisting with the Norfolk Regiment at the age of 39 while living at 14 Southampton Place with his family. Again, he was working as a barman at the time. He served in 214 Labour Corps and was awarded the 1915 Star and Victory Medals. His regimental number was 19413.

Private Stolliday served at home from May to December 1915 but on 16 December he was posted to the 7th Battalion and sent to France, where he stayed until May 1916. It’s unlikely (but I have no proof) that Arthur served on the front line, although those in the Labour Corps could easily have found themselves in range of enemy guns. Many died or were wounded as they went about the business of building and maintaining roads, railways, canals, buildings, camps, stores, dumps, telegraph and telephone systems and so on. Ironically, the only injury that Arthur appears to have suffered was a fracture in his left tibula, sustained in the mess at HQ in May 1916 when he slipped going to the toilet!

Arthur continued to serve in France and at home in regimental depots. After the war and having been demobbed, electoral roll records show the family at 15 Empire Parade in Sydenham Road, Sydenham, not far from his pre-war Penge home. The family would’ve lived about a shop in the thriving high street.

Family legend has it that Arthur then went to manage the Windsor Castle pub in Carshalton. However, a check of the licensing records show that he wasn’t the licensee – so was he just a barman? There are no records of the family either in any of the electoral rolls or street directories. However, his daughter Gertrude’s marriage certificate from 1930 lists him as a hotel manager.

Arthur died relatively young aged 60 on 5 October 1935 at St Giles’s Hospital, Brunswick Square, Camberwell. He was suffering from lung cancer, described officially as carcinoma of the bronchus on the death certificate. The latter recorded the family home as being 1 Lingards Road, Lewisham, and listed Arthur as a barman. His funeral was held on the 8th.

After his death, long-suffering Elizabeth went to live with her mother on the Essex coast. She died on 19th February 1952 at 91 Tankerville Drive, Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, and the cause of death was given as a cerebral haemorrhage – a stroke.

A short while before she died my dad remembers her staying with them in Caterham, Surrey, and it was there she suffered a stroke while sitting in a chair beside the fireplace. He was alone in the house with her and had to run for help after propping her back in the chair (she’d slipped out of it towards the fire). She was treated at hospital, came back to stay with them in Caterham for a few weeks before going back to Essex. He can’t remember whether this was the stroke that ultimately killed her or was one of several.

Arthur and Elizabeth had four children:

• Lilian May Stolliday (1898-1982), my great aunt. Lilian married twice, had three children and lived into her 80s.
• Arthur Edward Stolliday (1902-1972), my great uncle. Born on 14 April 1902 in Great Yarmouth, he was baptised at St Nicholas’s Church in the town on 1 June that year. As a child he moved with the family to Penge and Sydenham in South London but by 1912 was back in Great Yarmouth, enrolled at Edward Worlledge Senior School. Arthur married Alice Hutchins at St John’s Church in Southall, Middlesex, on 26 December 1929. – She was the daughter of cab driver John Hutchins and was born in Middlesex on 6 October 1903. Arthur served in the RAF, working as an engine fitter, and also worked for Fairey Aviation in west London. In 1949 there’s a record of him embarking on  the Arundel Castle on 18 April, sailing as an RAF sergeant to Southern Rhodesia. In 1951 he returned on the Carnarvon Castle from Durban, South Africa, to Southampton, arriving on 19 October. It’s unclear whether he was in southern Africa for the entire time but it’s likely that he was. Arthur lived at 42 Hammond Road in Southall for much of his adult life and he died in 1972. Alice died in 1967. The couple had a child:
  • Leonard Arthur Albert Stolliday, born in 1930. He married Jean Ditton in 1955 and died in August 2016 in a care home in Gorleston, south of Great Yarmouth. He’d lived in Beccles, Suffolk, for many years and had owned and run the Holgates menswear shop for several decades until his retirement. The shop was sold and eventually closed in 2019.
• Frank Benjamin Stolliday (1903-1904), my great uncle. Born on 10 August 1903 in Great Yarmouth, Arthur and Elizabeth suffered a family tragedy when their third child died at the age of 13 months on 23 September 1904 at home, 32 Camden Road, Great Yarmouth. He’d been baptised a few weeks earlier, on 31 August 1904, and was buried at Yarmouth Old Cemetery on 27 September. There were multiple causes of death given, including rickets, diarrhoea and exhaustion.
• Gertrude Maud Daisy Stolliday (1906-1992), my grandmother married Surrey native Gerald Wilfred Finch.

Sources: BMDs and census info at Ancestry.com and Findmypast.com, The London Gazette (2 October 1903, 6 October 1903, 20 November 1903, 22 December 1903 and various other dates). British Army WWI Service Records, 1914-1920, and British Army WWI Medal Rolls Index Cards, 1914-1920, London, England, Electoral Registers, 1832-1965 at Ancestry.com. Norwich Mercury 7 November 1903. Norwich Mercury 16 May 1891. Family memories. Records at Norfolk Family History Society