Lilian May Stolliday (1898-1982), William James Rowland (1889-1946) and William J English (????-1980).
My great-aunt and uncles.
Born on 15 April 1898 in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, Lilian (or Lily as she was known to family) was christened by parents Arthur Stolliday and Elizabeth Wetherall on 28 May 1898 at the parish church of St Nicholas.
As a child she studied at Edward Worlledge School in the town but the records, which show her living with family at 14 Northampton Place, note that she left the school and the district on 30 July 1908. This is the time the family moved to Penge and Sydenham in south London, a few years after her publican father had been made bankrupt as a result of poor business decisions and gambling. With the advent of the First World War and her father’s army service, the family moved back to Great Yarmouth. While there she would’ve experienced Zeppelin raids and attacks on the town from the North Sea by the German Navy.
Lily married Londoner William James Rowland in 1920 at Rochford, Essex. William was born in Bow, east London, on 13 September 1889 and by the time of the 1911 census was living with his family in the Old Kent Road, south London, working as a brass turner in a foundry along with his father and a brother. Lily and William had three children,
The 1939 Register records the family living in Earls Hall Avenue in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, with William described as a scientific instrument maker/radio communications. Doreen was working as a shorthand typist. Southend, its pier and neighbouring settlements were regular victims of enemy bombing throughout the war and towards the end it saw V1 and V2 rocket attacks, partly no doubt because of the presence of the civilian airport that became RAF Rochford for the duration. William and his family survived the war but he died on 7 January 1946, his address given as 17 Parkstone Drive, Southend. He left effects worth just over £1,000 in his will.
Lily married William English, known as Jack, at Totnes in Devon in 1951. The following year, when she registered her mother Elizabeth’s death in Essex, she was living at Corner Cottage, Sticklepath, near Okehampton in Devon. Over time they also lived in Selhurst, south London, and in a mobile home at Ringwood in Sussex. I remember visiting them while they were living in a small bungalow in Swanage, Dorset, when I was a boy on holiday with family in the resort. Lily died in Barrow in Furness in 1982, the town where her son Anthony and his family had settled. Jack had died in 1980.
Lily and her first husband had three children:
- Doreen Rowland was born on 24 October 1920 in Rochford, Essex, moved to London and lived at 97 St George’s Drive, Victoria, for several years before marrying Yorkshireman Fred Lancaster in 1951 in Westminster. He worked as a dye specialist in the wool industry and together they emigrated to New Zealand, partly because such work was getting thin on the ground in Britain but still flourishing in the Southern Hemisphere. The 1963 electoral roll shows them in Wanganui on the North Island but they were based mostly in Dunedin on the South Island. I vaguely remember them visiting us on their rare visits back to Britain but I don’t remember meeting either of their two children. Doreen lived to the age of 93, dying in New Zealand in 2013. Fred, who was born on 5 February 1915, had died in 1995.
- Raymond William Rowland was born in 1922 in Rochford, Essex, married Berrie Watkins in 1950 in Essex and lived in Oxfordshire for a time. I remember them living with their two sons in Wareham, Dorset, although I was very young at the time. Ray worked as an instrument fitter in the RAF during the war. Later he worked in the nuclear industry in Oxfordshire and at an Atomic Energy Establishment in Dorset. He died on 28 October 1990.
- Anthony Herbert Frank Rowland was born on 17 February 1930. He served in the Royal Navy in submarines, married Mary and worked for a shipbuilding company in Barrow in Furness, Cumbria, but died of a heart attack in 1988. They had a son and daughter.
Sources: BMDs and census info, plus other records, at Ancestry.co.uk and Findmypast.co.uk.