Surplus Women

The last entry brought to a close three generations of the descendants of Thomas Edward Bradley and Anne Jane Chapman. During this period the focus of the action quietly moves away from the docks and The East End, and from Middlesex into the lower-middle class surburbia of Forest Gate and West Ham in Essex, with many of the men starting to take up clerical and office work. The adventurous days of the mariners and menagerists of Rosetta Robinson’s family are left far behind as the Bradley clan settles down into more serious and respectable pursuits with not a hint of the scandals that had permeated the lives of previous generations. In short, it all starts to look a little serious, if not downright staid.

Of course the First World War is an ever constant in the background. Four years of bitter struggle led to the death of some 700,000 British soldiers, and brought the reality of conflict into the homes and households of virtually every family in the country, in a way that can never have happened before. The whole national psychology must have changed.

Furthermore, the war had created a gender imbalance with the post-war press referring to ‘superfluous’ or ‘surplus’ women. Mabel Louise Bradley (Auntie May) and her sister Maud Bradley were just two of many who lived out their lives as slightly eccentric spinsters, perhaps as a consequence of these changes. There is a photo somewhere of Maud and May taking a promenade somewhere on one of the southern English coastal resorts. Prim and proper in their hats and long black raincoats, they look ready at any instant to swing their handbags at anyone who steps out of place, or lets slip a misplaced word. They knew more however, one suspects, about the Bradley, Robinson and Wombwell skeletons in the cupboard than we ever will.

Surplus Women? Maud drops May a line at the beginning of 1914.