Rose Edith Ferry: A Newcastle Life

Every family tree has names that are little more than dates, and others that slowly gather into a person. My great-great-grandmother Rose Edith Ferry is one of the ones who has come into focus — a Tyneside woman whose whole life, as far as the records show, was lived within a few square miles of Newcastle upon Tyne.

Source: Tyne & Wear Building Preservation Trust

A daughter of the East End

Rose was born in 1883 in Newcastle upon Tyne, one of the daughters of Zephaniah and Margaret Ferry. By the spring of 1891 she was seven years old and living at 18 Camden Street, in the All Saints district near the heart of the city (an area now occupied by Northumbria University buildings), and the census-taker recorded her simply as a "scholar" — a child at school. It's a small word, but a telling one: it places her in a Newcastle classroom in the early 1890s, one girl among the crowd of children growing up in the city's tightly packed terraces near to the impressive All Saints Church.

A marriage, and a man from Norfolk

In about February 1901, Rose married William Henry Baker in Newcastle. She was only seventeen or eighteen — young to our eyes, though far from unusual for a working-class woman of her generation.

William had come a remarkably long way to stand beside her. He was a Norfolk man, born around 1877 in the village of Stanhoe, some six years Rose's senior, and somewhere along the line he had left the flat farming country of East Anglia for the smoke and clamour of industrial Tyneside — a journey of more than two hundred miles, and a world away from the place of his birth.

A houseful of children

The marriage quickly filled with children. The first, my great-grandmother Florence May Baker, arrived in 1901, the same year as the wedding, and over the following fifteen years five more followed, every one of them born in Newcastle:

• Florence May Baker (1901–1975)

• Rose Edith Baker (b. 1903) — named for her mother

• William Henry Baker (b. 1908) — named for his father

• Olive Audrey Baker (b. 1912)

• Archibald Ferry Baker (b. 1914)

• Sydney Baker (b. 1916)

There's a quiet tenderness in those names. The second daughter and first son were given their parents' own names, Rose Edith and William Henry, while little Archibald carried Ferry — Rose's maiden name — as his middle name, keeping her own family's name alive in the next generation. The two youngest boys, Archibald and Sydney, were born in 1914 and 1916, which means Rose was raising a young family on the Tyneside home front through the years of the First World War.

Making a home in Byker

By the 1911 census, Rose was twenty-seven and living at 174 Bolam Street in Byker, now the wife at the head of her own household, with William working as a grocer. By then the home already held the three eldest children — Florence May, Rose Edith, and little William Henry — with the rest still to come.

Byker was — and is — one of Newcastle's great working-class districts, a dense grid of terraces and Tyneside flats thrown up in the Victorian boom to house the families of the men who worked the shipyards, engineering shops and railways along the river. It was a neighbourhood of shared back lanes, corner shops and close community, the kind of place where everyone knew their neighbours. This was the world in which Rose kept house and raised her family.

Her parents, by this point, had settled just next door in Heaton, so Rose had built her married life only a few streets from the family she'd grown up with — a quietly touching detail that says something about how close these Tyneside families stayed.

Shield Street: home and shop, two doors apart

A decade on, the 1921 census finds Rose at thirty-seven, living at 166 Shield Street and recorded under the occupation "House Duties" — the language the census used for the enormous, unpaid work of running a home and raising a brood of children.

And here is the detail I love most. William was, by now, working as a grocer at 164 Shield Street — just two doors down from the family home. You can picture the whole shape of their days from that one fact: the shop and the household almost on top of one another, the children sent along the pavement on errands, Rose keeping the home while William kept the counter, the family business and the family life folded into the same short stretch of street. It's about as vivid a snapshot of an ordinary Edwardian-into-twenties working life as a record can give you.

The line continues

Of all those children, it is the eldest, my great-grandmother, Florence May Baker, who carried the family forward into the next generation when she married Albert Victor Rudd — a thread that, intriguingly, reaches back through the Rudd family all the way to Virginia, USA. But that is a story for another post. This one belongs to Rose: a Newcastle girl who became a Byker wife, a grocer's partner and a mother, and whose ordinary, rooted, hard-working life is the very stuff that family history is made of.