May 2010

This is the first article of a series on the theme
of “Family Fables”.

Most families have a collection of “family fables” which
have been passed down through the generations.
The problem is that they are often modified and
simplified during their progress, so that nobody is
quite sure what is fact and what is fiction. To make it
even more difficult, most of the stories are impossible
for us to verify. Here is a story revolving around a
Jerrems family member, Susannah Jerrems.

Who was Susannah?

Whenever I hear the name “Susannah” I think of the
song which has the lines “Oh Susannah, oh don’t you
cry for me, I’ve come from Alabama, with my banjo on
my knee”.

On a more serious note, Susannah was my great
grandmother, the wife of Charles Jerrems (Charles
was one of the Gainsborough family that migrated to
Melbourne in the 1850s).

The 1905 photo of Susannah was taken when she
was aged about sixty. She seems to be quite small
and has a somewhat formidable look about her. Not
the sort of person who you would attempt to
interrogate about her ancestry!

I had heard interesting stories about Susannah from
one of her granddaughters, my late Aunty Vi. Aunty Vi
was about 8 years old when Susannah died in 1917,
so she remembered Susannah quite well. The only
problem is that Aunty Vi did not like her grandmother,
so (as you will see) some of the information given to
me was not flattering.

Aunty Vi’s impression was that Susannah had been a
school teacher, however Susannah had some airs
and graces which made her the butt of family jokes. A
popular story was that one of her close relatives was a
Lady Ogilvy, Lady-In-Waiting to Queen Victoria. In
view
of Susannah’s airs and graces it seemed possible
that this was true, but my reaction was that it was
probably pure folk law with no foundation. That is, until
recently, when I came across a family tree containing
references to Susannah’s forbears. But first I will
remind you of another story about Susannah.

Susannah’s maid

In the July 2006 edition of the Journal I related the
following typical story about Susannah and her maid:

“Susannah always had a maid, whose sole
responsibility was to look after her mistress. With
typical Victorian modesty Susannah used to take her
bath with the bathroom door locked from the inside,
the maid and children being left on the outside. One
day the key jammed in the lock on the inside, so the
maid called out to a workman or neighbour to assist.
The man used a ladder to climb in the bathroom
window and fix the lock, to the discomfiture of a
scantily-clad Susannah.”

According to Aunty Vi the duties of the maid were
solely to look after Susannah, she did not carry out
any
of the usual domestic duties of a maid, like helping
with the cooking or housekeeping.

Susannah’s family

My great grandfather Charles settled in Sydney in the
late 1860s, where he married Susannah Druery in
1871. They had 4 children in Surry Hills, close to the
city: Charles Albert Druery born in 1872, Edwin Lewis
(“Ted”) born in 1874, Isabel (“Belle”) born in 1876 and
my grandfather Ernest Alfred (“Alf”) born in 1878.
Sadly
the next 2 babies died in infancy and Octavius died at
the age of 5. However the last baby, Richmond
(“Dick”), born in 1886, survived.

Charles Jnr was Laurel’s grandfather and Alf was my
grandfather.

Who was “Lady Ogilvy”?

Initially I thought that a good start would be to
google “Lady Ogilvy”, in case that gave me an easy
answer. Unfortunately for me, Princess Alexandria
married an Ogilvy, who in due course inherited his
father’s title as a baronet. This made Princess
Alexandria “Lady Ogilvy”, the title she prefers. She
does an enormous amount of charity work and
dominated my Google search with hundreds of
frustrating references.

Persevering, my googling revealed an earlier famous
Lady Ogilvy who was the very popular Lady in Waiting
to Queen Mary before the First World War. Born in
1866 she was the widow of David Ogilvy, the 11th Earl
of Airlie and was styled as Lady Ogilvy of Airlie. She
was appointed Lady-in-Waiting to the Princess of
Wales (later Queen Mary) in 1902.

Susannah was born in 1845, and her mother was
born in 1804, so this Lady Ogilvy (born in 1866) was
born much later than the one I was looking for. I could
not find any other references to a Lady Ogilvy who had
been a Lady in Waiting.

To confuse matters, over the centuries there have
been several Ogilvy lines with titles giving the title
holders the right to call themselves “Sir” and “Lady”. A
Lady Margaret Ogilvy who has gained fame in folklore
by escaping from prison in August, 1746. She was a
prisoner under sentence of death, in Edinburgh
Castle, on the charge of having levied war on King
George II by helping her husband to escape to France
after the famous Battle of Culloden. She escaped from
the prison by impersonating an old woman who
brought to the prison her clean linen once or twice a
week. Obviously this Lady Ogilvy was born far too
early, and with her track record was hardly likely to
become a Lady in Waiting!

 Susannah’s forbears

Finally I found a Family Tree registered on
ancestry.com which showed that Susannah’s parents
were John Druery and Isabella Jackson. They were
married in about 1839 in Hartlepool, Durham,
England. The 1851 UK Census shows that they had 7
daughters.
None of this looked at all promising until I looked
deeper and found that Isabella’s marriage to John
Druery was her second marriage. Her first marriage
was to David Skene Stephens (Stevens) Ogilvy in
about 1829 in India. They had 2 children, including
David Skene Stevens Ogilvy b: 1830 in Cape of Good
Hope.

At last, I was getting somewhere. At least Isabella
had a connection with a person named Ogilvy.
The family tree took me back several more
generations, where I found the note “Of the Airlie
Linage” (sic) indicating that Isabella’s first husband
came from the Ogilvy/Airlie line through his father,
Reverend Skene Ogilvy DD (1755-1831).

I did not attempt to work out how any “Lady Ogilvy”
had
been related to the Reverend Skene Ogilvy. I was
deterred by the fact that (according to one source) the
Airlie lineage can be traced back to 1172, when the
third son of the Earl of Angus was knighted, and
assumed the surname of Ogilvy. His descendant was
created Lord Ogilvy of Airlie in 1491.

Isabella in India

Isabella’s husband was a paymaster for the huge
East India Company, which effectively ruled India in
those days. The employees of the East India
Company who served in India would have been well
paid and would have had servants. When her first
husband died Isabella would presumably have been
the beneficiary of his estate and it is also possible that
the company paid Isabella an allowance or gave her a
lump sum.

Having servants did not carry over to her second
marriage because the 1851 UK Census showed that
they had 7 daughters but no servant.

In my previous article I concluded that “Also,
Susannah’s independent income enabled her to buy
a number of houses in Greenwich. Some were rented
out and some were occupied by the children when
they grew up.” This was based on the premise that
her husband Charles, as a bookbinder and with 8
mouths to feed (including the maid and himself),
would not have had much spare money. Significantly,
Aunty Vi said that Susannah had an independent
income.

Susannah’s father died in Sydney in 1870 and her
mother died in Sydney in 1882.

When Isabella died the estate would have passed to
her daughters, perhaps this accounted for reports that
Susannah had an independent income.

The life of David Ogilvy Jnr

The 1851 UK Census shows that David was living
with the Druery family in Yorkshire, working as a
plumber’s assistant for his step-father John. He
married Isabella Howitt (b: 21 JUL 1830 in Port
Stephens,NSW) on 27 JUL 1854 in Chippendale (in
Sydney), giving us the information that he migrated to
Australia between 1851 and 1854.

Sadly, he died at the age of only 32 in 1863 in Nowra
on the south coast of NSW. He had been a school
teacher at the Nowra’s National School, having lived
previously at Carcoar in the mid-west of the State. He
left his wife and three children.

Susannah’s social standing

In the 19th Century England was very stratified
socially. There was the notion of “one’s station in life”.
Admittedly, in Jane Austen’s book “Pride and
Prejudice” Elizabeth, the daughter of a gentleman of
reasonable means, married Darcy, who had a rather
vague aristocratic connection, but this was the stuff of
romantic fiction. The reality was different.

Susannah’s mother had previously married
an “Ogilvy”, who was a paymaster with the East India
Company. Admittedly this was perhaps a step up the
social ladder for her, but her second husband (John
Druery) was a plumber, and her father was a weaver.
Hardly the basis for aristocratic claims by Susannah.

The truth behind the fable

It seems that the original facts would have been that
Susannah’s mother Isabella originally married an
Ogilvy who reputedly had a connection with the Airlie
line. Seventy years later a distant relative of her
husband was Lady in Waiting to Queen Mary.

Obviously Susannah was not related to the Ogilvy line;
the best that could be said was that her mother
married an Ogilvy.

Where is Susannah now?

This is a particularly sad part of the story for me.

In September 2009 I visited Manly Cemetery (in
Sydney) to follow up information about Susannah and
Charles that I had found on the Manly Council
website.
The website contained a map of the grave plots
showing their location, whether they were “occupied”,
and whether or not they had a headstone.
These records showed that Susannah
(misspelt “Lusannah”) was interred in the cemetery in
1917 and Charles was interred in the same plot 10
years later.

The map showed that there was no headstone, as
was the case with over 50% of the graves, but I hoped
to at least find some traces of the grave. Instead I
found straggly grass growing over what felt like an
uneven layer of rubble. I felt particularly sad and
annoyed that my great grandparents were buried a
short distance beneath my feet but, thanks to the
gross neglect of their duties by the cemetery’s former
trustees, there was nothing left to honour their
memory.

As I stood there I could not help thinking that if I could
communicate with them they could tell me lots of
fascinating things, including Susannah’s version of
how she acquired her airs and graces. No doubt
many of you have had similar forlorn thoughts when
you stand at the foot of the grave of a relative.

Have you any family fables?

I would like to hear from you if you have any family
fables you would like to share with us. By coincidence
I do know that Sandra has a reasonably substantiated
story that a relative was (wait for it!) a Lady-in-Waiting
to Queen Victoria, a popular occupation. I will relate
the story to you in another article.

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