Neyland and Llanstadwell Heritage Group

By Nicola Morgan

Photos of Georgiana

A young, fresh-faced and inviting personality with an aura of benevolence.  Her gentleness and calm beams out of every photo of her.  She looks kind, and there is obviously a strong bond between her and her elder sister Catherine Mary (Kate) in the photos of them together.

There is something fascinating about these sepia photographs of long-forgotten women who, for myriad unknown reasons, had no children to help span their lives, tell their tales, cement their memories.  These women whose stories of ordinary lives might never be told …

Georgiana (sometimes Georgina) Cummings was born in Honeyborough on October 4^th 1870[1], the youngest of the five children of James and Martha Cummings. Like her older siblings, she was almost certainly born either in the family farmhouse (variously known as Cummings Farm, Browns Farm, The Old Dairy or 1, Honeyborough Green) or in Furze Cottage (now 3, Honeyborough Green)[2].

Her parents

Her father James was the son of a blacksmith hailing from Gloucester but, having lost both his parents by the age of eighteen, he had travelled west presumably in search of work.  In 1861[3] he is to be found working as a porter at Neyland Station, which had been opened only a few years before, and was the westernmost point of Brunel’s famous GWR. James Cummings found himself living on Honeyborough Green, next door to William and Mary (née Evans) Howell, dairy farmers of some 60 acres of land. James married their daughter Martha (literally ‘the girl next door’), in Llanstadwell Parish Church on November 10^th 1861[4].

The young couple set up home in Honeyborough Green, the very centre of the Howell family, even though Martha’s brother Thomas Howell was by now living with his in-laws in Jeffreston and her sister Eliza Hall would have moved with her new husband all the way to Cardiff. Her sister Elizabeth Evans Biddlecombe was living with her young family in Pembroke (soon moving back to live in Neyland), and her sister Jane was soon to be raising her family in Angle.

Her childhood

It is not too difficult to imagine the closeness of all these seventeen young cousins (all born between 1859 and 1871) and living in a such a small geographical area of Pembrokeshire, and so we can probably conclude that all these young cousins would have kept company with each other a great deal while they were growing up.

Railway porters at the time must have been fairly well paid, since the young Cummings family seems to have been comfortably off and able to afford some domestic help in the form of servants: firstly in 1870 one Elizabeth Card (according to an account of a complaint recorded on March 18^th 1870[5]), and subsequently Ann Owen, who is living with the family according to the 1871 census[6].

What must have seemed to be quite an idyllic childhood for Georgiana and her older siblings however would have been shattered by the death of their mother Martha in 1874[7] at the age of only 41. Their father (still recorded as ‘Railway Porter’) was left to provide and care for their five children (aged only 12, 10, 8, 6 and 4) alone. It must surely have been at this time that the wider Howell family must have stepped in to help support the widowed James and his young family; perhaps most significant would have been support offered by the late Thomas Howell, now established in Cosheston . His three daughters, Daisy, Florence and Lilian, were the same ages as the Cummings children, and these two branches of the family remained especially close for generations to come.

While the three Cummings brothers (James Herbert, William George and Arthur Thomas) are all to be found registered at the local school, the names of both Georgiana and her older sister Catherine Mary (known as Kate) are conspicuous by their absence. Of course, at this time even primary education was not compulsory nor entirely free, and it was a commonly held view that it was more important to educate sons in a school setting, while girls were taught the domestic skills they were deemed to need as adults by their mothers at home. Following their mother’s death, it might well have fallen to the ten-year-old Kate to run the domestic household, whilst teaching her little sister the basic skills she herself had learned, and this alone might explain the closeness of the bond felt between the two girls. Interestingly, by 1881[8] there is no longer any domestic help listed with the family – although whether this was because James could no longer afford to keep servants, or because his two daughters (aged 16 and 10) now assumed responsibility for the smooth running of the home, is difficult to tell.

Whilst nothing is certain about their culinary prowess, they were obviously not unusual in the family in being keen needlewomen. There still exists a sampler made by their mother Martha in 1844 at the age of eleven, and she and their aunt (Elizabeth Evans Howell) were each described as ‘dressmaker’ in the censuses of 1861 and 1851 respectively. Perhaps Kate had learned how to stitch at her mother’s knee before she died, and she herself taught her younger sister – for although we have no evidence of a surviving sampler by Kate, there are two in existence by Georgiana, one completed in 1880 at age 10 (which incidentally is where she apparently chooses to call herself Georgiana rather than simply Georgina), and one in 1883 at age 13[9].

Whether they were regular church-goers is not known, nor whether they worshipped at Llanstadwell Parish Church (where the family baptisms and marriages seem to have taken place) or Hephzibah Chapel in Little Honeyborough (where some family graves are to be found) is not clear. 

It does however seem from the evidence of the samplers that the church played some significant part in the lives of this family; there are certainly scriptural passages and religious poems quoted after the usual workings of the alphabet and numbers in all three examples.

By 1881 Georgiana is described as ‘scholar’ (despite there being no record of her registration at school) and she and all her siblings are living with their widowed father James at 39 Great Honeyborough. Here James describes himself as ‘Farmer of 25 acres’, indicating a change of occupation for him, and the only other bread-winner is the eldest son James Herbert, now aged 18 and a carpenter. 

Her adult life

Over the next ten years, each of Georgiana’s siblings had left the family home to forge their own paths, but at age 20[10] she was still living with her father (now aged 54 and still describing himself as a dairy farmer) on Pantile Cottage Road in Honeyborough, until in late November 1895 he suffered a fatal cerebral haemorrhage[11]. It would seem likely that Georgiana was there with him at the time, and quite possibly witnessed the death of her father alone, but she seems to have managed to get a message to her eldest brother (James Herbert, now married and living in Cardiff), since he is noted as the informant of their father’s death.

It would be interesting to know when and how she met John Husband Owens, an eligible shipwright (living in Leonardston in 1891), but meet him she did. Perhaps she had already been ‘out walking’ with him, or perhaps their eyes had simply met at church one Sunday in early 1896. Whatever the story here, they were married at Llanstadwell Parish Church on March 28^th 1896[12], four months after her father’s death.

It must have been some adventure for Georgiana to leave her familiar surroundings to follow her new husband to where he had found work near Dover in Kent – where they are to be found on the 1901 census living in New Brompton[13]. In the absence of children to care for, one imagines Georgiana keeping herself busy looking after their lodgings and perhaps doing some dressmaking. Yet the couple obviously moved back to live in West Lane, Honeyborough sometime before 1904 (perhaps because John was ill?) since sadly his death certificate shows that John Husband Owens died there on 4^th January 1904 at the age of only 35 years, having suffered from pthisis (now more commonly known as TB). Again poor Georgiana had called upon her brother James Herbert Cummings (now living with his family for a short while at 20 Kensington Road, Neyland) for support at this time, and it was he who registered his brother-in-law’s death.

Georgiana only survived her husband by a mere three years. It looks as though her death was not unexpected, as in July 1906 she made her will whilst living at 8 West Lane, leaving all that she possessed to her much-loved sister Kate. On 11^th March 1907 Georgiana died at age 36, after suffering chronic nephritis (kidney failure), probably for some considerable time. As Georgiana’s brother-in-law Thomas Griffiths registered her death as 'having been present at the death', it must surely mean that his wife Kate would have been there at the end to comfort her younger sister too.  

Author: Nicci Morgan