The Sowerbys Depart for America

Although the facts state that Herbert Sowerby and Ann Fanny Wombwell concluded their service in China in 1894, we do not know their next move. It would have been strange indeed if they had not returned to England to see their respective families, including an elderly George Wombwell junior. In his 1897 interview with the Daily Mail however, George made no mention of Ann Fanny, and whilst on the one hand, he may have felt that his daughter should have provided him with some concrete rather than merely spiritual support, she, equally, may have been still harbouring resentment about his desertion of her after the death of her mother, Fanny Ann Kienlen, and his subsequent marriage to his much younger second wife. It is entirely possible that their relationship was damaged beyond repair. 

To what extent George was aware of, or even interested in, the dramas that had unfolded in China is yet another matter. The misfortunes of his pious daughter and her mercilessly abused husband may, for all we know, just have afforded the old man just a certain grim satisfaction. 

From the FindaGrave website

In either case, with six children in tow, the Sowerbys would hardly have been able to enjoy any extended stay with George, by now reduced to single room accommodation of an advisedly squalid character. It would have been to Herbert’s family that they would now have proceeded.

All this is admittedly hypothetical. The next firm records for the couple come from the 1900 USA census for Michigan. By 1910, they were permanently settled in Bedford, Virginia where they were to live out their days, and where their children were to grow up as American citizens. 

Ann Fanny Wombwell died in 1923 in Bedford, and Herbert three years later, in 1926. It had been a long journey for Ann Fanny. The grand-daughter of an Essex cow-keeper, Zacharias Wombwell, and the daughter of a failed menagerist who lost her mother at an early age and was effectively deserted by her father, she succeeded in climbing up the social ladder into a well-known Victorian family, only to find herself under the most bizarre circumstances running a girls’ school up the Yangtze river before becoming a naturalized citizen of the USA. 

But, like her father, she had certainly accumulated some memories to contemplate in the last years of her life.