Morals to Stories?

Thanks to Stella Wilson, the story of the Carter family can be taken a little further. Stella’s mother, Patricia, was the only daughter of Thomas Kenneth Gregory Carter (born 1908), the son of Thomas Edmond Carter and Catherine West Robinson. Stella’s story is as follows:

Thomas Kenneth Gregory Carter was illegitimate, brought up by a family in Walworth, South London he was left with while his father worked. One day his father never returned. His mother, we believe, was a domestic servant and unable to care for him since she was raising 4 younger brothers and sisters. His father, Thomas Godfrey Carter, was the eldest of the Carter children. It was his inheritance that allowed him to run a wife and a mistress.

Catherine died of TB not long after the court case. Her husband, Thomas Edmund Carter, a draper, took the children to his family in Monmouth. He died a few years later so the Carter children were orphaned. Thomas Godfrey married a girl from the same town, Ellen Teague, and they settled in Clapham, London. Childless, Thomas Godfrey met up with a woman called Kate Morrison. We think they met at the London Temperance Hospital where she worked and he was a patient... he suffered from pancreatitis which eventually killed him in 1921. Three months before his son, aged 14, had found out his real identity and traced his father to his place of work, the Metropolitan Water Board. 

1901 Census showing Thomas Carter junior and Ellen Teague in Clapham

We may safely assume that contacts between the Carters and the Robinsons were definitively severed by this point. The ongoing drama and rupture brought on by the Robinson-Neal court case, do however, in all fairness, suggest further engaging lines of speculation, regarding the relationship of the two Wombwell sisters, Harriett and Sophia, and the motivations and resentments that might have provoked Thomas Carter to head to the courts in chase of the Wombwell legacies. It is hard to avoid in the meantime, the lingering suspicion that Harriett Wombwell may not have been the most conciliatory or compromising of characters. On the other hand, the ill-conceived opportunism of Thomas Carter no doubt led to legal fees that he may or may not have been able to afford, to his departure from London with the two children to Monmouth, and perhaps indeed to his premature death there in 1871, the very same year that Harriett Wombwell herself died.

For those who like morals to their stories, the whole sequence of events brought on by the careless disregard of Charles Robinson for confirming that he was indeed a widower before embarking on a second marriage, provides fertile ground. One can’t help feeling at the end of it though that the primary victims were the Carter children.