Setting the Scene

Charles Albert Eldridge (left) and his elder brother
(Alfred Thomas). Inset, Charles in the Great War.

In the part of this Blog, the central figure was Hetty Jane Owen. In following her genealogical footpath back to North Wales, and further into County Down, Ireland to explore her Anglo-Norman origins, a genuine sense of a composite British identity began to take shape. Hetty Jane numbered amongst her extended ancestral family, the famous Wombwell menagerists, Irish Unionist politicians, Welsh printers, English mariners and more besides. In 1915, she married Charles Albert Eldridge in Blean in Kent. Such marriages, and there must have been many of them, may have been days of joyous celebration but they would necessarily have been streaked with fear and foreboding. All the congregation would have been aware that the Charles would soon be returning to France, and that there was every chance that he might not return. In March 1916, Hetty Jane gave birth to Olwen Rose Eldridge, an authentic child of war conceived in the midst of the thunder, fire, stench and turmoil of the Western Front.

In this second survey, the story resumes, the focus now shifting in its entirety to what would seem to be a tale of a quintessentially English family with broadly Anglo-Saxon and Jutish antecedents, and long-standing roots in south-eastern England. Whilst old family documents from Hetty’s side were always suggestive of a semi-dramatic narrative, the Eldridge archive, or what existed of it, seemed to make no such elevated claims. Furthermore, neither Harold Eldridge, son of Charles, nor his older sister, Olwen appeared to have absorbed much of any import about this side of the family from their father at all. When pressed, the most they could come up with was that they thought that the family originally came from the Wirral.

As we shall see in due course, Charles’ grandfather did indeed live in that area, in Bromborough Pool, to be precise, but neither he nor his ancestral line heralded from the north at all. In fact, his grandfather, Thomas Eldridge, was born in Putney, Surrey, barely a stone’s throw down the river from where Charles' son, Harold Eldridge at one time lived and worked in Wandsworth. Thus, these Eldridges between them had succeeded in just a couple of generations in almost wiping the historical slate entirely clean, thus leaving a fairly daunting task of restoration to their descendants.