War Breaks Out

It was only three years after the 1911 census that Europe finally imploded and the great powers of the day embarked on a war that was expected to be over in a matter of months, but which degenerated in a four-year long orgy of slaughter.

Charles Albert Eldridge, like so many others, was to join up and play his part. This focused minds all around. Some of the family seem to have relocated at least temporarily in this period to Whitstable, and in nearby Blean, the lodger, Charles who was younger than Hetty-Jane Owen by some seven years, married her in 1915. Their first child, Olwen Rose Eldridge, was born in on the 13th March, 1916 in Islington.

For once, luck was on Hetty Jane Owen’s side. Charles returned from the Western Front intact and resumed his career in the silver business, in Northampton Square, Islington, just near the Goswell Road. Whether through good fortune, dedication or inspiration, the firm of Charles Edwards was taken over by Charles in 1924, and a new era began.

In the meantime, Maria Rosetta Bradley continued with her life with the ‘Bearded Bugger’. She never ever forgot Edward Samuel Owen however, and seemed to feel a duty to pass on a sense of Welsh identity to her children. The name ‘Olwen’ was selected for Hetty Jane Owen’s first daughter, and Maria Rosetta adopted for her preferred form of address by her grandchildren, the Welsh ‘Nain’ for grandmother. All this seemed to make sense to the half-Welsh Hetty Jane, if not her husband or children, and periodic family holidays were to take them back to the shores of Lake Bala and the hills and valleys of their Welsh ancestors.

It may be suspected also that Maria Rosetta had imbibed a certain measure of Calvinist Methodist philosophy, as a form of sustenance that would provide at least some meaning to the bloodshed of the war years. She was most likely also still in contact with Winifred Anne Owen, her companion widow, and with other Owen family members resident in London. And when the Reverend David Samuel Owen, her daughter’s second cousin, and a famous preacher of the word, arrived in London in 1915 and took up residence at Jewin Chapel, it is unlikely that Maria Rosetta could have resisted taking Hetty-Jane Owen with her to hear the master Welsh priest spin his honeyed oratory to his expatriate congregation, and make sense to them of the cataclysm they were experiencing, and the redemption that it might offer.

Welsh chapel goers, possibly outside Jewin Chapel in London. See: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-24995180