Mabel Victoria Day (1897 - 1943)

The DAY family and other paternal forebears of Mabel Victoria DAY

Mile End, Old Town some of the old buildings have survived the W.W.2 bombing

Bale Street has disappeared but Bale Road retains the name. It is now in the middle of a largely Asian community

Charles John DAY was born the 10th October 1870, the second child of Charles DAY and Mary Eliza HAMMETT who were living at Regent Road, Mile End Old Town, then Middlesex. Stonemason Charles was the son of another stonemason Charles whose interesting career will be detailed later. A 20-year old bachelor of Bale Street, Stepney, Charles married Mary Eliza HAMMETT, aged 18, a spinster born in Ireland, of St Dunstan’s Road, Stepney, in the parish church on the 16th August 1868. Two months later a daughter, Ada Louisa, was born to them at Anthony Street, St George in the East, in the sub-district of St Paul, Middlesex. One, but by no means the only possible reading, of ensuing events suggests that something seems to have gone wrong with this marriage. Presumably they had to get married as a consequence of Mary Eliza’s pregnancy. Did Mary as a young mother fail to bond with her daughter? Was Ada Louisa born with some defect or disability that rendered her unacceptable to Mary? Or did Charles and Mary simply not get on? All that is certain is that at the time of the 1871 census, Ada, then 3, was living with her grandparents, John and Elizabeth Hammett, at St Dunstan’s Road, Mile End Old Town:

St Dustan’s Church where Charles Day married Mary Eliza Hammett in 1868

In 1881 Ada, then aged 12, was still living with her grandmother at Newbold Street, Mile End Old Town:

Modern council houses now stand where the old cottages were, but the name has been retained.

And again in 1891, as a 21-year old tailoress:

The unmistakeable, but possibly quite mistaken, impression is that Ada Louisa had been rejected by Mary, or Charles, or both of them, for one of the reasons listed above or for something else that has not occurred to this family historian.

At the time of the 1871 census, Charles and Mary were apart, he living with his elderly parents at Bale Street, Mile End Old Town

Note: after Charles DAY’s occupation it says “(wife absent)” while she, together with baby son Charles John, was a short distance away in Conway Terrace with two families named LIGHTON and CLARK

How Mary and baby Charles, aged respectively 21 and 6 months, came to be registered as 28 and 6 could be simply an enumerator’s error or possibly some sort of cover-up by Mary to conceal their true identities. By 1881 the family, always without Ada Louisa of course, is together again at Emmott Street, Mile End Old Town.

A 19th century house in Dongola Road – Mabel's parents would have lived in a house like this.

By the end of this decade they disappear from view. In March 1888 Charles, aged 38, described not as a stonemason but as a commercial traveller of Norris Street, Hoxton Old Town, Shoreditch, died of diphtheria, followed a few months later by his father Charles, “mason of West Ham”, at the age of 79. Mary Eliza, who registered her husband’s death, has not been found in the 1891 census; she was not with her parents and daughter at Dongola Street. She would have been 36 at the time of Charles’s death; Ada Louisa was not with her, and the probability is that her son Charles, then aged 18, would have been making his own way. So Mary Eliza may well have remarried; but the event, if there was one, has not been found, nor has her death.

What has been found, however, is the marriage of her daughter, Ada Louisa, then aged 27, on the 23rd September 1895 to Charles Edward SLAVEN, aged 39, a seaman born in Antigua, at St. Paul, Bow Common. The marriage was witnessed by her mother Mary Eliza and great-uncle Joseph HANAN. In the 1901 census, Ada Louisa and family turn up at 354 Mile End Road, Stepney:

So was there nothing wrong with the Charles/Mary Eliza DAY marriage after all? Was it sheer pressure of accommodation that made it more convenient for Ada Louisa to live with her grandparents? That she seems, moreover, to have been a healthy young woman able to attract a husband and bear children suggests that she had no major disability.